A monoculture exists when one breed of a crop or product dominates the landscape – and a single new threat wipes out the crop.
Windows has long been the king of infections because of it’s large install base. Why do most criminals, malware writers and viruses attack windows? Because that’s where the money is.
In a novel twist, processor-hungry malware is attacking OSX machines because Apple has created a monoculture with it’s rigid lock on the operating system and hardware specs. Get root on a modern Mac and chances are, it’s got a beefy video card (GPU) and these days, GPUs bet CPUs for number-crunching horsepower by several orders of magnitude.
Illicit Bitcoin miners steal resources from infected Macs
Passwords, browsing history also harvested
Posted in Malware, 31st October 2011 21:24 GMT
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Security researchers have identified malware that hijacks the resources of infected Macs to illegally mint the digital currency known as Bitcoin.
The DevilRobber.A trojan has been circulating on The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent trackers, where it’s bundled with the Mac OS X image-editing application Graphic Converter, researchers from Sophos blogged on Monday. Like previous malware attacking Windows PCs, it commandeers a Mac’s graphics card and CPU to perform the mathematical calculations necessary to generate new digital currency, a process known as Bitcoin mining.
As researchers from rival antivirus provider Intego point out in their own blog post, Bitcoin mining is just one of the many activities performed by the recently discovered trojan.
via Illicit Bitcoin miners steal resources from infected Macs • The Register.
