Archive for November, 2007

Mac Malware

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

Yes you heard right. The first malware written for the Mac has been named OSX.RSPlug.A by Intego (a Mac-security company). The malware is disguised as a video-codec that users are tricked into installing in order to watch nasty movies. This malware is written to hijack DNS of the machine it’s installed on, redirecting their web requests to another web page. The thing about this is it only redirects users who attempt to visit one obscure adult website. It could be alot worse, it could have spoofed bank sites, paypal, or ebay.

This malware doesn’t exploit a hole in the Mac OS, instead it relies on good old social engineering. McAfee researchers have already found this on 65 websites, so this is becoming widespread fast. Security has never been a priority to Apple, soon all types of nasty software will exploit holes that do exist in the OS.

Security researcher Gadi Evron
“Apple’s day has finally come, and Apple users are going to get hit hard, OS X is the new Windows 98.”

Source: Wired

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Sony Helps Fight Diseases

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

Many may be aware of the Folding@home project run by Stanford University, but thanks to Sony now they have a Guinness record. This record certifies the Folding@home project as the most powerful distributed computing system, reaching over 1 petaflop (thousand trillion floating point operations per second). In comparison the SETI@home project has only reached 256 teraflops (265 million floating point operations).

What does Sony have to do with the record. Well more than 600,000 PS3 owners have been donating their spare cpu cycles to the project and this along with others donating their PCs spare cycles have netted the project the World Record.

Source: News.com

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