Malware hidden in vid app is so nasty, victims should wipe their Macs It's going to be an unpleasant weekend for some Mac users who are facing a complete system wipe and reinstall – after hackers stashed malware in legitimate applications. Eltima Software, which makes the popular Elmedia Player and download manager Folx, today confessed the latest versions of those two apps came with an …
Yes they are, one has an army of fanatics that will defend their choice of platform against their rival to the bitter end, and the other has a larger army of fanatics that will defend their choice of platform against their rival to the bitter end.
@macjules:"And not forgetting that one side was founded by a charismatic, obsessive compulsive with psychological issues, while the other side was founded by a charismatic, obsessive compulsive with psychological issues .."
...while Linus is an obsessive compulsive with psychological issues and no charisma.
"As a famous Commodore engineer once said: There's nothing nasty about Bill Gates, and there's nothing nice about Steve Jobs.
... and oh boy was he wrong.
Bill-boy was at least as nasty as Steve, but on different level because market position. So much nasty they stalled DoJ in monopoly abuse case so long that the president they'd bought got elected and dismissed whole case as a pay-back for "campaign money".
There aren't many companies who can reach that level of evilness, not even IBM could.
The pensioneer-Bill is totally different animal, has barely any connection at all to former Bill. But he's not losing money: A charity you own is still personally yours. Except you don't pay taxes.
Also inheriting a charity is not taxable. Think about that a while ... all of those billions and $0 inheritance tax. And you get to claim in public that "heirs aren't inheriting any money".
Which is true, they just inherit the sole ownership of a foundation. Which owns tens of billions.
I repeat: Bill is not losing money with this 'charity' thing: 5% of the capital to charity purposes (choose whatever you want), the rest is yours. 5% yearly profit without taxes should be trivial to any company. Even without stock gains.
Totally legal of course, that's the whole idea: Tax loopholes for the ultra rich.
There was persistent malware as far back as the Amiga! There was battery-backed RAM into which it was possible to install a little nasty that would get written to every floppy inserted into the machine and would write itself to any uninfected Amiga that the floppy was put into.... It didn't do anything malicious, just spread itself to almost every Amiga I ever saw!
Nearly. Amiga RAM was not battery backed, what this used was a persistent RAM drive called a RAD drive. Anything stored in this type of RAM drive would survive a soft reset of the system (the normal RAM drive was wiped by a soft reset). Powering the system off would clear the RAD drive.
If you had oodles of RAM (for the time) you could copy the OS to the RAD drive and configure the system to boot off it which made for a ludicrously fast booting system.
I think your title was right, there have been several instances of software company's build systems getting hacked. This sounds like more of the same.
The reason is probably because this is the easiest way to infect a lot of people. Compile your infection into software that either automatically updates itself or is updated regularly by users, and you get a lot more people than if you did it the old fashioned way and needed to find a remote root exploit or trick them into downloading something they shouldn't.
Not much you can do as an end user about this except hope that as that keeps happening software companies will pay more attention to the security of their build environment and maybe consider taking it offline (I know, why would they do that when it is less convenient...)
Once the system has been compromised, what script are you going to run that guarantees to restore the system state correctly? How can you trust anything that the OS tells you, once you've been infected?
It's not a Windows vs [U|Li]nux thing at all, it's just common sense, regardless of the operating system.
"Once the system has been compromised, what script are you going to run that guarantees to restore the system state correctly? How can you trust anything that the OS tells you, once you've been infected?"
If we were to treat the US government as an operating system, would I be right in diagnosing it's been rooted with a nasty malware infection?
If we were to treat the US government as an operating system, would I be right in diagnosing it's been rooted with a nasty malware infection? ... Haku
Haku, Howdy,
For Bigger Picture and Greater IntelAIgent Games Plays, if we were to diagnose the US government as a nasty malware infection, what operating systems would require major life-threatening surgery as the only effective life-saving treatment?
No need.
The solution is the same no matter what generation of .gov software your country has installed.
Erase the partition WashingtonDC then create a new partition and format with whatever .gov system you feel you require.
If I might offer some advice; make the partition much smaller this time.
I agree that you can't trust the OS itself afterwards, but with Linux at least it would be possible to boot off a live DVD/USB and run a scan from a known good OS to clean out any infection of the system.
The only way to get around that would be to have a firmware persistent malware at which point you'd have to wipe and reinstall the firmware for everything as well, probably over USB.
"I agree that you can't trust the OS itself afterwards, but with Linux at least it would be possible to boot off a live DVD/USB and run a scan from a known good OS to clean out any infection of the system.
The only way to get around that would be to have a firmware persistent malware at which point you'd have to wipe and reinstall the firmware for everything as well, probably over USB."
You can do that with Macs, too. It's perfectly feasible to create USB boot flash drives. It's even more feasible to create bootable external hard drives, and somewhat more difficult but still possible to create bootable DVDs. It would be trivial to boot off one and clean the drive.... _if you already had created such an item_. I, personally, have bootable flash drives with 10.11, 10.12, and 10.13 installed, and have full bootable backups (plural) of my working drives. It would be trivial for me to fix this. The easiest way would, actually, be to put the bad system into target disk mode and clone back one of the backups. However, I have backups and boot flash drives. The vast majority of John Public does not have either and look at you as if you just flew in from Mars when you suggest that maybe, just maybe, having a backup might be good, and that maybe, just maybe, it might be a good idea to have a bootable installer.
How much am I bet that the majority of those affected have no backups whatsoever?
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