Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Malware, or What The Hell Is This Sodding Popup Doing On My Mac

I happened to mention to Beloved (diehard PC user) that I'm getting a lot of irritating popups about ringtones and casinos recently. He said 'Turn off pop-up windows in your browser'. I said, 'They already are'. He said, 'Turn off Javascript'. I said, it is.

He said, "If it's not your browser settings, it's malware. I've seen a lot on the web lately about stuff targeting OS X'.

I was honestly surprised at this. The current wisdom seems to be that there are (not many? less than ten?) proof-of-concept exploits, none of which have been found in the wild, and we had better keep good security habits, but the only people trying to talk up a scare are companies like Symantec and McAfee, who have their own axes to grind.

Googling now, I have found there are indeed several nastywares out for OS X, although most of them seem not to be getting out onto ordinary users' machines.

I have found no reference at all to some damn adware pop-up involving 'mediaplex', 'ringtones' or 'casino' in a context involving OS X.

Mogcow (...not scared, just annoyed...)

I'm still getting damn pop-ups every so often asking me about ringtones and casinos. What is happening here? I will do what Beloved suggests ('Run whatever Task Manager's called on a Mac') and see what appears in Activity Monitor when the popups pop up.

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