Number: IRCNE2014112364
Date: 2014/11/05
According to “techworld”, Apple's security technologies for Mac OS X may still miss iWorm, a piece of malware discovered in late September that infected thousands of computers.
Apple released an update for its XProtect antivirus engine to detect iWorm, but the update only detects when iWorm's installer is launched, which is a one-time operation, said Patrick Wardle, director of research with Synack, a computer security company based in Redwood City, California. He wrote a paper describing his findings.
Apple "released a signature, but it doesn't address the problem," Wardle said in a phone interview Tuesday. "Unless the user has another antivirus product installed that has a correct signature, those infections aren't going to go away."
iWorm, which is a backdoor that can steal data from a computer, infected more than 18,000 machines, according to security company Dr. Web. It does not exploit any vulnerabilities on Mac OS X but instead relies on tricking people to install it.
"Unfortunately, it [iWorm] is able to bypass Apple's malware mitigations really easily," Wardle said. "It illustrates that malware on OS X is a problem. It's not that Macs are immune to malware."
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