Fears over new Mac OS X trojan unfounded

Compared with their Windows-using brethren, Macintosh owners have enjoyed a largely malware-free existence during the life of the Internet.

On Friday, we found about a new trojan spotted on macrumors.com. Dubbed Leap-A, the trojan passes itself off as being composed of screenshots from the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). The file itself is called latestpics.tgz, and actually getting your computer infected with it takes a fair amount of work. First you have to double-click to decompress it. After doing so, you'll be left with two files, one of which bears the icon for a JPG file. That's the executable. According to a post on Ambrosia's forums, the worm will make a copy for you and then attempt to send copies of itself to people on your local Bonjour! buddy list via iChat.

It's a fairly harmless bit of code, and some have described it as a proof of concept. In fact, antivirus firm Symantec designated it a "Level 1" threat, which is at the bottom of the scale for malicious code. Despite the trojan's harmlessness, a number of sites are seizing on this, calling it the first Mac OS X virus to be discovered.