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

[Alain Schremmer]

Thomas A. Schmitz wrote:

>
> 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.

A couple of days ago I renewed my subscription to Norton Antivirus. 
Today, I got "hit by the Hacktool". I am glad I saw the previous 
exchange so I did not panick and since I kept it I will now know what to do.

Still, I don't like that and I was wondering if you would say what you 
are using instead.

Regards
--schremmer
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