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About OS X 'trojan horses'
Authored by: rhowell on May 12, '04 01:26:37PM
Worse would be to insert this unix command into the ID tag of an MP3 (or picture) file. Intego has already shown how easy this is to do.

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About OS X 'trojan horses'
Authored by: arondale on May 12, '04 01:44:02PM

Although it is no secret, it is better not to post things like this, IMO. I would guess far more people would try this script out on someone else's computer than the chance of someone actually getting this script through an email, image, etc.

Now you've just told both coders and non-coders alike how to walk into an apple store or university and cause destruction in less than 10 seconds at an apple keyboard.

?



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I agree, sort of...
Authored by: GORDYmac on May 12, '04 02:18:26PM

...those who would do such a thing probably would find a way, anyway. But I do feel uncomfortable reading it here.



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About OS X 'trojan horses'
Authored by: rabbit101 on May 12, '04 06:27:27PM

Actually, I disagree. You would probably learn this command within the first 30 minutes of your first ever Unix class. Trying to keep it a secret is like trying to prevent people from understanding why something so simple as pulling a trigger or lighting a match can be devastating and used maliciously, which makes them sitting ducks for the sorts of socially-engineered computer 'tricks' that are just now appearing on the Mac horizon (and are much more difficult than viruses to prevent since they rely on loopholes in *humans* instead of computers).



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Meh
Authored by: Dogcow on May 13, '04 12:20:35AM

Any mac sys admin worth anything knows to not allow basic users access to the terminal.

-Dogcow "moof!"



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About OS X 'trojan horses'
Authored by: davidbodonnell on May 13, '04 03:42:41PM

People who are malicious at heart are going to find far worse things to do to others than tricking them into executing rm -rfd ~



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About OS X 'trojan horses'
Authored by: aranor on May 12, '04 02:36:23PM

That's misleading. Sure, it looked like it was in the ID3 tag info but it's not a real ID3 tag, it was just benefitting from the way an MP3 file is constructed to make itself both an MP3 file and an executable.

As a side note, I once ran across an example of a .gif file that was also a .zip file. It was a picture of a dinosaur, but if you changed the extension from .gif to .zip you could decompress it. The way it worked was a .gif keeps information about the size of the file in the header, but a .zip keeps a table of the information at the tail of the file. That way you can just append a .zip file onto the end of a .gif and you have a file that's both! Cute, eh? Oh, and the .zip file was the original DeCSS code. This file was on the gallery of DeCSS obfuscations.



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