According to Reuters, the first computer worm designed to attack Apple Computer’s Mac OSX operating system has been detected. Yet another reason why hackers and designers of worms, trojan horses, and viruses should be hunted down and….well, something really, really bad should be done to them.
I don’t know the answer to the problem of the malicious harm done to others by such low life, but the damage done is serious and the penalties and countermeasures should be commensurate. (And, yes, I’m especially pissed now because I recently switched to the Mac platform. It’s personal.)
Per Macintouch, an easy way around one of the recently discovered attacks is as follows –
Disable the “Open ‘safe’ files” option in Safari preferences
Use a different web browser (e.g. Camino, Firefox)
Rename the Terminal program to something else (e.g. “Terminal123”) – [or create a zipped archive and delete the original (Control-click on Termianl in Applications>>Utilities)]
Be extremely wary of what files you download and/or open.