Hackers pay 43 cents per hijacked Mac

[Howell, Paul]

At
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/320033/hackers_pay_43_cents_per_
hijacked_mac?eid=-255

Hackers pay 43 cents per hijacked Mac
Russian cyber crime gangs after Apple's Macs, too, says researcher

Gregg Keizer (Computerworld (US))  28 September, 2009 08:23

A network of Russian malware writers and spammers paid hackers 43 cents
for each Mac machine they infected with bogus video software, a sign
that Macs have become attack targets, a security researcher said
yesterday.

In a presentation Thursday at the Virus Bulletin 2009 security
conference in Geneva, Switzerland, Sophos researcher Dmitry Samosseiko
discussed his investigation of the Russian "Partnerka," a tangled
collection of Web affiliates who rake in hundreds of thousands of
dollars from spam and malware, most of the former related to phony drug
sites, and much of the latter targeting Windows users with fake security
software, or "scareware."

But Samosseiko also said he had uncovered affiliates, which he dubbed
"codec-partnerka," that aim for Macs. "Mac users are not immune to the
scareware threat," said Samosseiko in the research paper he released at
the conference to accompany his presentation. "In fact, there are
'codec-partnerka' dedicated to the sale and promotion of fake Mac
software."

One example, which has since gone offline, was Mac-codec.com , said
Samosseiko. "Just a few months ago it was offering [43 cents] for each
install and offered various promo materials in the form of Mac OS 'video
players,'" he said.

Another Sophos researcher argued that Samosseiko's evidence shows Mac
users, who often dismiss security as a problem only for people running
Microsoft's Windows, are increasingly at risk on the Web.

"The growing evidence of financially-motivated criminals looking at
Apple Macs as well as Windows as a market for their activities, is not
good news -- especially as so many Mac users currently have no
anti-malware protection in place at all," said Graham Cluley , a senior
technology consultant at U.K-based Sophos, in a blog entry Thursday.

Mac threats may be rare, but they do pop up from time to time. In June
2008, for example, Mac security vendor Intego warned of an active Trojan
horse that exploited a vulnerability in Apple's Mac OS X. Last January,
a different Trojan was found piggybacking on pirated copies of Apple's
iWork '09 application suite circulating on file-sharing sites.

Mac OS X's security has been roundly criticized by vulnerability
researchers , but even the most critical have acknowledged that the
Mac's low market share -- it accounted for just 5% of all operating
systems running machines that connected to the Internet last month -- is
probably enough protection from cyber criminals for the moment.

Samosseiko's paper on Partnerka can be downloaded from Sophos' site (
download PDF ).


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