If there's one thing that OSX users have breathed a sigh of relief not to have had to deal with, it's viruses. And adware. OK, two things. Not forgetting spyware. All right, three things.
Anyhow, F-Secure says it has seen (and tried) a proof-of-concept sample of an adware program for OSX which can install itself in the OSX System Library using "a feature not a bug" and just copying.
In theory, this program could be silently installed to your User account and hooked to each application you use; and it doesn't require Administrator rights to do so. We won't disclose the exact technique used here... An Admin could install this globally to all users.
The result: This particular sample successfully launched the Mac's Web browser when we used any of a number of applications.
This is easier to do than with Windows. After all, it's a Mac.
Here's hoping that the feature gets rapidly revoked... No Thanksgiving for Apple's security researchers, we suspect.
