“Welcome to the summer of the worm,” writes Dennis Fisher for eWeek. “Hard on the heels of the Blaster worm outbreak, yet another version of the resilient and ever-popular SoBig virus began spreading rapidly on the Internet Tuesday morning. Known as SoBig.F, the new variant behaves much like its older siblings, infecting Windows machines via e-mail and sending out dozens of copies of itself.”
Fisher reports, “The variant began spreading early Tuesday Eastern time, and by 9 a.m. Tuesday, MessageLabs Inc. had stopped more than 10,000 copies. The virus size is approximately 73 KB, and the attachment that actually contains the malicious code can carry any one of a number of names, according to iDefense Inc., a security company based in Reston, Va… SoBig.F installs a copy of itself in the Windows registry, in a file named ‘winppr32.exe.'”
Full article here.
*Yawn*
We know already…none of these viruses affect the Mac, that’s another reason why I bought one. How about more stories that actually DO affect Macs since this is a Mac news site…enough about Windows….
hahahaha
I love these stories
yeah enough windows stories 🙁
Just a another reminder of why we have Macs. Trustworthy Computing…Ha!
I, too, have been slowly seduced and sucked into the Enquirer-like hole of cheap gossip and grade-school-like bashing that emulate real news and information. I am really getting tired of the Microsoft bashing at MacDailyNews [“news”?]. It’s very cheap and outright childish. Not that I like M$, I don’t. But, I come here for Mac NEWS. With all of the latest releases by Apple and other manufacturers, I’d like to see more info on Mac support and news rather than Mac gossip and Microsoft bashing!!
A few years back, this was oneof the best places for solid news and intelligent comments. Does anyone know of a website that has more serious Macs NEWS and INFO content? I’d rather wade through obnoxious advertising than crap journalism.
[Let’s see how fast this post vanishes!]
1. These viruses and worms affect Mac users because this sheet bogs down the ‘Net.
2. It’s August (The Dog Days of – no less) – there IS NO Mac news.
3. If more news outlets pointed out that Macs are unaffected, clearly in the headlines, maybe more than 5-10% would be using Macs?
4. Aryugaetu, please remove the stick up your arse.
5. For the Windows users wavering, this is but one more reason to open your eyes and step into the light!
Many people do not realize that Macs are unaffected. Or even want to believe it. This sort of story and headline helps get the info out and provdes me a link that I can email to interested parties. Thanks.
Shame on you, Aryugaetu. MacDailyNews keep doing what you do so well and I’ll keep coming back for more!
Aryugaetu, perhaps you’d enjoy MacCentral more. Whoops! From MacCentral:
“New strain of Sobig Windows virus circulating – 2:50 pm ET”
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/08/19/sobig/
Seems the only thing MDN did wrong was post the story over an hour before MacCentral.
Aryugaetu: the Mac Web’s very own critic… oh yeah, and resident asshole:
http://www.themacobserver.com/comments/commentindivdisplay.shtml?id=27468
I love the Wintel bashing. For those of you who don’t like it, just pass on the article. That’s what I do when I see something I’m not interested in.
Aryugaetu,
I LOVE comming to MacDailyNews to see whats making the windows world hell and the mac world my eutopia. Besides its pretty funny. 😀
what happens when some genius writes the killer worm for osx?
Keep the Windows virus/worm info and Microsoft bashing coming! I post links to such stories on bulletin boards all the time as a way of stating my case for the Mac. Most computer users are utterly blind to these things.
I’m laugh…nervously. I would like to know more to protect my mac.
The day someone can write a virus that infects Mac OS X will be the day I start believing ANYTHING the Wintel trolls on this forum insist of posting DAY AFTER DAY AFTER DAY AFTER DAY!
Viruses can be written for Mac OS X. How many of you all out there are running your machine as “administrator”?
The problem is spreading it so that it runs “automatically”.
I’m sort of hoping I can find something in an MP3…
Trojan Horse AppleScript and Java applications – people double-click on it and presto deleted hard-drive.
If you use M$, you deserve what you get. Bill and his boys don’t care about their customers, once they have the money. Jezz some people like pain or are just plain stupid. Probable a lot of both.
Regarding a virus on OS X…
Idiotic users release viruses onto their machines by blindly opening email attachments (at least among home users). Mac users are generally much less idiotic, so even if one were to successfully write a virus that were able to propogate itself outside of an individual Unix machine (includes OS X), the greater challenge would be to lobotomize enough Mac users to make it effective.
so no one thinks it can be done?
In order to write malware for OS X one would have to learn a lot about OS X. That rules out most script kiddies. Let’s face it, if you understand OS X that well how could you be that pissed at Apple that you would such a thing?
Mac OS X viruses CAN be made, but even after several years, none have been. Someday a few WILL be–but never as many as on Windows. I say this because I’ve been looking into viruses on UNIX in general–and NO flavor of UNIX has remotely the level of problems with worms and viruses that MS does.
We’ll just have to accept that we’ll never fully be able to join the fun.
Explore and enjoy–security bulletins for every OS and vendor from the US DOE:
http://www.ciac.org/ciac/bulletinsByType/bul_vendor_list.html
Looking at the TEN MOST RECENT bulletins for ALL flavors of Mac OS combined will take you all the way back to the 1980s! Only two for OS X–both vulnerabilities that were patched without being exploited. Both in 2001… nothing for 2002 OR 2003 for any Mac. Other UNIX versions fare nearly as well as Macs.
The ten most recent bulletins for Windows XP alone take you back… 7 months! Lots of worms and viruses. The total for all Microsoft products is 49 bulletins… in 2003 alone.
One issue with M$ worms is the COM architecture. It requires no knowledge of the internals of Windows system for a worm to ask – say – WinZip to unzip a virus, Windows to launch the application, and Outlook to send replica of zipped virus to all its address book as attachment.
On OS X (and Unix) the same author should practically know every details on how interoperate all those internals. Not so easy.
That’s a very simplistic explanation but contains the essential lines.
An Applescript can do basically most of those things but not invisibly: ie you would see applications launched in front of your eye rather then behind the scenes and renders things less effective: practically all applications on OS X asks for permission to the owner like: where do you want to unstuff this, shall I delete that?, do you want to send this message now?
Sure there might be some Macs to be configured with all the default replies set via preferences but those are certainly not going to be the majority. On Windows everything (from a worm) can be commanded without the user even noticing an application is doing what the work has asked it to do. On a Mac the worm would need much more user cooperative real time interaction in order to complete its work.
Oh yes, forgot: some Windows PC got MSBlastered. Now the enfoced policy is to shut down Windows computers whenever they are left unattended. LOL
Don’t you love it? Can’t stop giggling and my Windows colleagues cannot but look at the floor when I pass by LOL
They shut down at EVERY coffee LOL
Serious: they start asking about Macs and OS X
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sobig socheap soignorance sostupid somisinformed now live in the same house.
you forgot sowintel
More recent Outlook viruses *do* affect Mac users. With most viruses spoofing the sender’s address now, it means you may get lots of email from irrate people who think *you* gave them a virus. This guy is from MacNetJournal is currently snowed under with messages:
http://boingboing.net/#200444022
My wife got a bunch of virus-related messages on her Mac last week; she was annoyed. I told her she didn’t have to write back to everyone explaining she coulnd’t get it or spread it; she could delete the messages and forget about it instead. It’s not her problem…
With these new worms, poor Windows users can’t even tell who’s got it anymore. My boss got a bunch of them on his PC a few weeks ago. He couldn’t tell if he even had the virus or not but had to deal with it somehow, so he decided to buy a Mac instead.
affecting the user yes, affecting the computer operations *not*. Macs are – to my last checking it – capable of be online. Hnece they WILL receive as many virii and macros as a straw-man PC.
The PC gets affected, the Mac not. We are talking about disruptive actions from the worm/virus that will bring your computer to its knees.
Does happen on PCs, does not on Macs.
Macs can be asymptomatic hosts of Micros**t virii/worm. They do not harm your system but may destroy the next PC you happen to infect.
So to eliminate any confusions there migh be on all these thread: you can get them – you are online are you? – and you may infect other PC.
They cannot harm your system but you may transmit them.
And by the way: using Outlook is like being naked on a secluded beach with a bunch of horny ex-cons just out of jail and be surprised you get bang-raped.
Trash the Outlook crap already.
Even corporate IT now realize Outlook should be banned from use.
You COULD get the email and send it on to a PC who would get infected… but why would you send the virus email to them anyway? Other viruses/worms, that don’t arrive as emails, could not get on your Mac at all.
Indeed: the focus was on having Outlook virii (which are actually Outlook macros) but the attachment can contain an exe as well which would be a real virus.
On a Mac you may not realize that the attachment contains a macro and pass it on. There has been – for example – macro spreading through email containing – low and behold – a virus alert. The naive user would the pass it on to all his friends even thinking s/he was doing the right thing. The attachment does not work (does not even start or open) on the Mac but the naive user believe it is integral part of the warning.
I once taught computing and informatics to an adult school. You would not believe what people believe computers are and what could do
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To close with a detail on MSBlaster. This virus is exploiting a flaw in the buffer overrun of Microsoft’s Remote Procedure Call implementation, MSBlaster opens a comms port (#135) and sucks in its own code, turning the attacked machine into another attacker, and so it proliferates. Macs do not get the virus and do not pass it on.