Danger's high

The news is abuzz with talk about the "first Apple Mac virus" investing Mac computers.

But blogs are buzzing this week about what two Symantec researchers have called the first harmful computer program to strike specifically at Mac.

This Trojan horse program, dubbed the "iBotnet," has infected only a few thousand Mac machines, but it represents a step in the evolution of malicious computer software, Haley said.

The iBotnet is a sign that harmful programs are moving toward Mac, said Paul Henry, a forensics and security analyst at Lumension Security in Arizona.

"We all knew it was going to happen," he said. "It was just a matter of time, and, personally, I think we're going to see a lot more of it."

Sorry folks, but it's not really so. The media, as usual, is incapable of doing its job, instead doing the spinning of special interests, in this case of McAfee and Symantec. They've flat-out missed the point.

The point to the spin, of course, is that Mac users need to start getting all afraid of the giant anti-virus enemy forces that would otherwise be amassing their anti-Mac bands of Al-Qaeda operatives hell bent on destroying the Mac, except for the fact that the Mac represents only an irrelevant 7 1/2 % of the market. That would be similar to the logic that terrorists aren't all that interested in destroying Israel because it's this tiny, irrelevant little county.  Is anyone so so gullible as to believe that hackers coding viruses don't want to be recognized as the ones who finally cracked open Mac security?

But then there is this little nugget, the buried lede on the story:

Mac users at large, however, should not be alarmed by the incident, experts said. The program infects only computers whose users downloaded pirated versions of the Mac software iWork.

In language even the media can understand, the point here is that this is not malware in the traditional sense of a virus. It does not spread from computer to computer, peer to peer, without action by the computer user. Rather, it is a feature. Yeah, it's a malicious feature, designed into an illegal (I'll repeat that - illegal, as in stolen, pirated, criminally obtained) copy of software used by people who steal software. And stupid criminals, too, as the software is available for a free 30-day trial from Apple. But it's a feature nonetheless. The only way to get it is to steal an illegal copy of the iWork '09 software to which a malicious program has been added. 

Put even more simply, you have to take action yourself to install the thing. You know, that message you get that tells you that you are installing software downloaded from the internet and which asks you if you want to continue with the installation, which is not from a trusted source. Yeah, that's why it's there. That's why there are rules, codes of conduct.

Antivirus software makers are spinning this as the harbinger of future threats against the Mac, as evidence that you need to protect yourself by turning over control of your computer to them. I would expect to hear that no computer with Symantec's antivirus software has been infected by iBotnet, even though it probably doesn't protect against it. Be very, very frightened.

They've learned well from Dick Cheney.

And that's also my commentary on Cheney's speech and media blitz.