[OS X TeX] OT: effective Macintosh Trojan in the wild

Thomas A. Schmitz thomas.schmitz at uni-bonn.de
Thu May 5 02:44:00 EDT 2005


On May 5, 2005, at 2:00 AM, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> Earlier, looking for swap files, we had found on my colleague's HD
> one /private/var/vm/swapfile0 (and indeed I have one too, 64 MB in
> size, on my Tiger PowerBook), but no swapfile1 which was the file
> reported by Norton AV as infected. Odd!
>

Just a small remark: when the load average goes up, OS X will create  
those swapfiles and number them consecutively. When the load average  
goes down again over an extended period of time, it will delete them  
again. I have seen this behavior on my box: after doing some memory- 
intensive stuff, I could see swapfiles0 through 3 in /var/vm. After a  
while of normal use, swapfiles 2 and 3 were deleted again. So, to sum  
up: the fact that you couldn't find the offending file doesn't mean  
it wasn't there when Norton reported it.

This being said: I've stayed away from all Norton products since the  
advent of OS X, and my computing exeprience has been a lot smoother.  
Even on Mac OS 9, the latest atavars of Norton System Works were  
extremely unstable and dangerous; with OS X, it was disastrous.

Best

Thomas
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