The latest offender is a Trojan horse by the name of MAC Defender, which purports to be a virus-scanning application. In fact, it does little more than encourage users to give up their credit card information.
Identified by security firm Intego,
http://blog.intego.com/2011/05/02/integ ... antivirus/
MAC Defender spreads via search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning--that is, it uses commonly searched terms to get prominent placement in search engine results. So, users looking for legitimate protection against viruses on their Macs might be duped into downloading and installing MAC Defender instead.
Once installed, the program apparently pretends to detect viruses and opens Web browser windows with pornographic sites, to help sell the charade that the computer is infected. It also configures itself to launch at startup and is difficult to quit as it only appears as a menu bar icon and not in OS X's Dock. If users try to clean the viruses, they first have to register MAC Defender; clicking on the link to do so via the program's About screen takes them to an unsecure Website that offers a 1-year, 2-year, or lifetime license to the program for $60, $70, or $80 respectively. Registering halts the virus warnings, thus "confirming" that the program is working.
As nefarious as MAC Defender might be, the level of concern over infection remains low
I got hit with this this morning. I didn't pay, but still had to get help cleaning it out. It hides itself in applications, and not in the Dock icons, but up top, so you can't easily force quit it in order to delete.
To clear it out:
Open Finder
Go to Utilities
Open Activity Monitor
Drag anything labeled MAC Defender to the Trash
Empty Trash
"Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” -King T'Challa, Black Panther
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~Winston Churchill
Sounds like a variation of the fake virus alert virus that's been going around on Windows systems for a while. It's a nasty one. If I didn't have to run IE for work I'd be running Ubuntu.
