You are here

Trojan Horse in a Mac?

Submitted by Karthik on 9 April, 2004 - 08:46

I'm sure that a few Macheads' Macjaws would have dropped at the use of 'trojan horse' and 'Mac' in the same sentence; but it's true ;P Wired is carrying a story on the new MP3Concept or MP3Virus.gen trojan that masquerades as a MP3 file, and is triggered when the file is played. While the Wired article downplays the trojan as benign, this TechTV article provides a less sanguine report.

The MP3Concept trojan masquerades as an MP3 file. Once clicked, malicious code in the MP3 file's ID3 tag is executed, code that has the potential to delete files from a user's hard drive.

The trojan then spreads by emailing itself to other addresses in the user's address book. In addition to MP3 music files, MP3Concept can also infect image files such as JPGs and GIFs, and MOV QuickTime movie files.

Intego, (an antivirus company) who discovered the flaw, have already readied an update for the vulnerability. You will however need to use their product VirusBarrier to get the update ;) The Intego 'security alert' can be read here.