Mac Virus? trojan.byteverify infects installerapplet.class?

[adambyte]

Heh. Now it seems more like a theological debate: Somebody points out stuff happening. One person looks at it and says, "Oh my Gosh! It means this!" Another looks at it and says, "That doesn't mean anything." And then there are others which abstain from judgement.

lol

 

[Darkshadow]

1 vote for abstaining here!

 

[Andrew Adamson]

I'm still gonna be the pessimist (or optimist, however you look at it) and say that her programs crashing were still coincidence and unrelated to the Java file.

I have no idea how you can assert that given that, according to the account, the problems began with a Java module on an unpatched virtual machine with known and documented vulnerabilities, she ran a virus scan and the problems stopped. Perhaps a tear in the fabric of space caused a build-up of chronoton particles in her neural net. Perhaps it didn't. See Occam's Razor.

...doesn't remember exactly what she did to find or get rid of the virus other than running Norton AntiVirus -- the same program that recently gave false positives on the "hacktool.underhand" virus).For all we know, it could have been Norton's itself causing the application instability, as it is VERY well known to do!

I know everyone hates Norton, but this is about as perfect an ad hominem fallacy as I can imagine.

Of course, you could be right. In the absense of perfect knowledge, we have no way of knowing exactly what happened. But I read more stories on this board about people having unexplained crashes. Things work one day and fail the next. Hardware won't mount. Programs behave unexpectedly. Whatever. In the Windows community, the first thing out people's mouth is, "Did you do a virus scan?" Here, that's the absolute LAST thing anyone says. Neither is the right response. But part of a healthy attitude about security is being vigilant and careful. Not being knee-jerk and filled with panic every time your computer lets off a smelly fart. And certainly not filled with hubris and hot air. Mac security is fantastically better than Windows', but it is not impregnable. To say otherwise is retarded.

I literally don't know what more to say.

 

[aliciaperusse]

okay folks. The same thing that happened to the lady who brought this issue up in the first place is happening to me right now. I don't recall opening any strange files but my boyfriend may have. NAV informed me that the file swapfile was infected with the virus called hacktool.underhand. After I deleted this file (there were three copies of the file which Norton quarantined) I ran a full scan which came up saying that blackbox.class, VB.class, Beyond.class and some java jar thing had been infected with a strain of trojan.byteverify but all files were either corrected or deleted. Safari won't work, at all. It quits before it loads my homepage. Everytime. I tried upgrading all the software. Now-hacktool.underhand is supposedly a false positive that was caused by the nature of the swapfile...really it's NAV's fault. Even though everyone is saying that this "virus" is a false alarm I still can't get Safari to work and other applications are quite unstable as well and I am experiencing kernal panic. Any suggestions. What that woman was talking about is real, not just a coincidence. I am starting to wonder if deleting swapfile has created this mess?? Help!

 

[aliciaperusse]

Also I ran a hardware scan and everything is fine on that end. I am wondering if Java has something to do with it? I've even reinstalled my software. I'm getting nowhere. Explorer is working just fine though it occasionally quits. does explorer use java? I upgraded java and i have version 1.4.2 according to the file menu but when the app. java web start is open it says that it's version 1.2. Also I have tried installing or upgrading safari and it comes in as a text file and other software downloads are coming in as excel files. It's as though the system is changing files into other applications. It's all very frustrating.