Kibbles & Bytes Blog

It’s that time of year again: the leaves are on the trees, the flowers are in bloom, the lawnmowers are humming in the distance (__except for mine because it is a human-powered push mower-Mike D.__) and we prepare to honor our Dads and grads.

We have three tiers of specials perfect for the person in your life who has replicated or matriculated. These specials are also available with any computer we sell, so please give us a call if you want a different Mac bundle for those who are done with school and those who have contributed to the gene pool.

Get ready for motorcycle season with a brand new iPod touch with enough room for all of your Steppenwolf records and the Easy Rider sound track.

The latest malware attack on the Mac OS has largely blown over, though I still hear people talking about Flashback and viruses on the Mac. One thing that keeps coming up are the amount of people calling Flashback a virus when it’s actually a trojan. Intego, an antivirus software company, runs a Mac security blog and they did a pretty good article recently on the various terms for different types of malware, so I thought I’d share some of it with you.

Most people seem to lump all malicious software into the term “virus.” This is inaccurate. All malicious software can be lumped into a catchall term of malware. Viruses are a very specific type of malware that replicates and spreads itself once installed on the computer. To my knowledge viruses are still pretty rare on the Mac, mostly because the majority of black hat hackers are writing code for Windows-based systems. What Macs are currently vulnerable to are trojans. These are malware that masquerade as legitimate programs and are installed by the user. Once installed they can cause harm to your system.

Flashback was a trojan (as was MacDefender) that hit last year, and both of which were done by the same people. Flashback disguised itself as an Adobe Flash updater and once you installed it, it would redirect certain ad-centric web traffic to a different server. Had it worked like the hackers planned, the revenue for those ads would have gone to them rather than the advertisers. These trojans almost always require user intervention to install themselves. So if you’re not paying attention to what you’re clicking on or entering your passwords for you are vulnerable.

I think it’s a good idea nowadays to have antivirus software installed on your computer. While the majority of malware out there will not affect your computer, that number is going to change. The market share of Apple computers is increasing, and with the popularity of iPhones and iPads we’re becoming more of a target to nefarious computer users. There are many antivirus programs on the market, and some are better than others. Some will slow your machine down to a crawl and others let your machine still run great but don’t actively scan your hard drive.

I’ve gone back and forth between “*Sophos*”:http://www.sophos.com/en-us/ and “*ClamX,*”:http://www.clamxav.com/ and it really comes down to personal preference. If you’d like to read Intego’s article on security jargon (I’ve only covered a small fraction here) you can “*read it here.*”:http://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/security-jargon-decoded/

July 9th is being called “Internet Doomsday” by some security firms and trade magazines. Last year, “*the FBI arrested several people*”:http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/9/six-estonians-arrested-in-cyber-infestation/ who were running an international scam. They used malware called “DNSChanger” to modify network settings on millions of computers worldwide; instead of going to local DNS servers, these infected systems went to rogue servers controlled by hackers who made an estimated $14 million from advertising revenue.

The servers were rendered harmless, but a lot of people are still unknowingly using them, so the FBI kept them running to give people time to clean up the mess. These servers will be taken offline on July 9th, so anyone still pointing to them on that date will have problems accessing Internet sites.

Last November, “*we featured an article*”:http://blog.smalldog.com/techtails/tt793/ that explained how domain name resolution works. The rogue DNS servers mentioned above took advantage of DNS redirection in order to draw traffic. Normally, your system has the address of your ISP’s DNS server, or the address of your company’s internal server. The DNSChanger malware would alter this setting to point to a network controlled by hackers, so instead of sending DNS requests to Comcast or Verizon, you’re sending them to a compromised server that may or may not give you what you wanted. Unless you went into your network settings and checked, you would have no idea that anything was different. Even if you did check, how would you know whether or not the numbers were correct? They’re just numbers, which by themselves don’t mean anything to most people.

Internet Service Providers typically have multiple DNS servers. If one goes down for any reason, another will take over. However, the entire cluster of formerly-rogue DNS servers will be taken offline July 9th, and there is no automatic failover. When an infected system tries to go to Facebook, instead of their wall coming up, it will return an error that the site could not be found. The system will no longer have a DNS server to look up where “www.facebook.com” is. Tech support lines will be flooded with people who suddenly can’t access the Internet, most of them assuming that it’s the fault of their provider.

Before that all happens, everyone should check their system to make sure they are clean. Here are two sites to visit: “*DNS-OK*”:http://dns-ok.us and “*The DNS Changer Working Group.*”:http://www.dcwg.org DNS-OK is run by the FBI, and will run a quick check on your system to make sure it is set correctly. DCWG will not only tell you if you’re clean, but offer tips and links to fix the problem if you have it.

I urge *everyone* to check out one of those sites to verify that they were not affected. That goes for Mac users as well as those on Windows–gone are the days of sitting back and smugly saying, “I’m on a Mac, it can’t affect me.” WRONG–the past year alone has shown that we ARE vulnerable, if not by flaws in the OS, then by flaws in Internet clicking discipline. Check out your system before the deadline so you’re not dead in the water.