Worm targetting Apple OS

These days Apple is enjoying a very good market share all over the globe. Security is one of the most important reason why people would prefer Apple's Macintosh machine compared to Windows.

One reason for The Apple Mac's low susceptibility to malicious attacks is because the Operating System is based on the UNIX based kernel which is pretty much stable than the windows platform. Moreover, right now the single digit market share of MAC is not looking too lucrative to the professional hackers.

Since last few years, the visibility of Apple has increased a lot in the personal computing space. Its compounded by IPhone's stunning success throughout the world and hence controbuted a lot to the visibility of Leopard, its operating system. Mac are now being used by the enterprise segment.

The latest malicious threats to the Macintosh OS is a trojan horse named ASthtv05. Some world renowned analysts has classified this issue as a critical one and raised an alert for it. This trojan can compromise the latest patched versions of Leopard and can eventually take the control of the infected computer. Moreover, it also gains complete administrator rights once the user opens the trojan file. It then opens ports in the firewalls, logs all keystrokes, transmits user names and passwords, takes pictures from the Web camera and also turns on file sharing. It also hides in the background and might turn off system logging thus even preventing the user to come to know that the system is even infected.

An interesting point to note, however, is that the source code for this trojan is freely available on the net. This has led researchers to think that the several variants of the exploit code may sooner or later will come. Right now, Apple hasn't commented anything about this threat, through SecureMac's security software can disable this malware. The researchers are also confident that soon Apple will release a patch for this exploit.