New Trojan horse targets Mac users

A rare Trojan horse attacked the Mac community last week and its name is AppleScript-THT. The Trojan exploits Apple Remote Desktop Agent in OSX 10.4 and 10.5 to grant it root privileges and compromise the system. Once the system is infected, hackers can log your keystrokes, take pictures with your iSight camera, and capture screenshots.

Before you run to your bomb shelter remember this is a Trojan, which means that it has to be downloaded to be effective. Hackers will most likely distribute it via iChat or Limewire. All you have to do to be safe is not download anything that you don’t trust. This means that if you’re frequently downloading illegal music you’re going to be at risk (this is why I have been buying my music for years now).

Even though this kind of thing is bad for a lot of people, for Apple users as a whole it’s a good thing. As Apple’s market share grows it will start to look more appealing for hackers to exploit it. This means that Apple will start to look at improving is security issues. So in the end this will just push Apple to make their already great platform even better.