Tag Archives | Security

The Mac’s Malware Problem Just Got A Lot Worse

Apple may have thought that its statement yesterday would get the Mac Defender mess under control. But the malware is back under a new name–MacGuard–and in a more dangerous form.

ZDNet blogger Ed Bott, who’s known more for his reporting on Microsoft than on anything Apple, has been hot on this story since the get go. He reported Wednesday that as if on cue the Mac Defender creators have released a new version of the malware application that requires no password at all to install.

See, Mac users -including myself–have accurately pointed out that basically all attempted malware for the Mac required the user to enter the administrative password. If you did that, it was your own stupid fault for getting infected. With MacGuard, it’s completely different.

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Okay, Maybe This Mac Security Problem is Real

“A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.” I thought of that old wisecrack this morning when I encountered something I’d never seen before: a serious trojan attack on my Mac.

The attack in question was an instance of Mac Protector, a variant of the Mac Defender attack that’s been in the news this month  (my friend Ed Bott has written about it repeatedly). I was browsing in Safari and suddenly got this window, looking a bit like OS X’s Finder and a bit like iTunes (click on it to see it at a larger size):

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Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer’s Surprising, Cranky New Tone

Facing increasing criticism of his company’s handling of the PSN hack — and now apparently a new security issue — Sony’s CEO Sir Howard Stringer has suddenly become much more vocal in striking down critics. The company’s new logic appears to be that “no network is 100 percent secure,” and that the attack on its servers was “unprecedented.”

Stringer’s comments came in the form of interviews with several outlets, including Bloomberg, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, and others. He argued that the company’s notification of the hack within a week was faster than other companies have alerted their own users of data loss, sometimes months after the fact.

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Sir Howard Speaks Out

Sony’s Chairman and CEO, Sir Howard Stringer, has released a letter to PlayStation Network users; read it after the jump. (Me, I would have edited out the “even” in the bit about making the network’s “defenses even stronger.”)

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How to Tell Me You Let Somebody Steal My Personal Information

I’ve been getting a lot of urgent messages from major companies I do business with lately. Urgent messages telling me that information I gave them has been stolen by unknown parties.

Yup, I’m not only a PlayStation Network member–and therefore a victim of the current Sony security breach–but also a customer of at least three companies (Marriott, TiVo, and 1-800-Flowers) who were involved in the recent data theft from marketing company Epsilon. I wrote about this for my new TIME.com Technologizer column, But after reading all this correspondence, I have some advice for the corporate entities who send these e-mails. (I care about this stuff in part because I have the uneasy feeling I’m going to be getting a lot more of these messages in the future.)

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