First Mac OS X Botnet Appears On The Web

Researchers have pointed out the emergence of what could be referred to as the world’s first ever Mac OS X botnet, which inflicts infected systems to trigger denial of service attacks. 

Alfredo Pesoli and Mario Ballano Barcena notified that the malware was discovered back in January, when the security firm Intego cautioned about a Trojan horse concealed in the trial iteration of iWork’09’ application, which was doing rounds in peer-to-peer file sharing networks.

Now, the researcher duo has come up with a couple of distinct variants of the malware, each employing different techniques to compromise users’ systems. 

Commenting upon the severity of the new variants, the researchers wrote, “The code indicates that, wherever possible, the author tried to use the most flexible and extensible approach when creating it - and therefore we would not be surprised to see a new, modified variant in the near future”. 

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The duo further went on to say that with the increasing interest of malware authors in the Mac platforms, more advanced spoofing attacks seems to be there in the offing. 

The new research from Symantec comes in the middle of reports of a string of unpatched, actively-exploited security holes in OS X and report that a researcher has discovered the way to run shellcode on iPhone. 

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