Hackers Jack with Macs

First, JJ (Jesper Jurcenoks of NetVigilance) told me to stop saying Macs were immune to hack attacks, and now Symantec says the same thing. I didn't put his Mac warning in this column about NetVigilance, but the news from other places reinforces what JJ told me.

Here's the scam, long used against the Windows operating system. Hackers, either with or without the knowledge of porn site operators, offer to download a special codec for hot new video files. Say yes, download the codec, and your system becomes their bi...er, property. Simple and straightforward, you're scre...er, penetr...er, man it's hard to avoid the easy (and very cheap) bad puns for this report.

This exploit relies on the user doing something monumentally stupid: downloading a file they don't understand from a site they shouldn't trust. Security people will tell you users do these kinds of stupid things every single day. Remind your coworkers not to be the next victim.

So if you used your Mac to download suspect files from suspicious sites thinking you're safe, the jig is up. Now a Mac exploit moved from the lab to the real world, and into real user's computers. Dumb downloading on a Mac may now become as painful as dumb downloading on a Windows machine.

On the other hand, if ever a security story deserved to be on Naked News, this is is it.