Apple’s security technologies for Mac OS X may still miss iWorm, a piece of malware discovered in late September that infected thousands of computers, according to the IDG News Service (http://tinyurl.com/qxuhav8).
Apple released an update for its XProtect antivirus engine to detect iWorm, but the update only detects when iWorm’s installer is launched, which is a one-time operation, according to Patrick Wardle, director of research with Synack, a computer security company based in Redwood City, California. It means that computers already infected with iWorm before the update would still be compromised, notes IDG.
iWorm, which is a backdoor that can steal data from a computer, infected more than 18,000 machines, according to security company Dr. Web (http://tinyurl.com/k42z9kh). It does not exploit any vulnerabilities on Mac OS X but instead relies on tricking people to install it.