Macintosh Viruses - Leap Virus, Nvir, Macmag, Scores, Mdef, Sevendust, Init 1984 (Paperback)

Chapters: Leap Virus, Nvir, Macmag, Scores, Mdef, Sevendust, Init 1984. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 23. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: The Leap or Oompa-Loompa computer virus is an application-infecting, LAN-spreading worm for Mac OS X discovered in February 2006. Leap cannot spread over the Internet, and can only spread over a local area network reachable using the Bonjour protocol. On most networks this limits it to a single IP subnet. The Leap worm is delivered over the iChat instant messaging program as a gzip-compressed tar file called latestpics.tgz. For the worm to take effect, the user must manually invoke it by opening the tar file and then running the disguised executable within. The executable is disguised with the standard icon of an image file, and claims to show a preview of Apple's next OS. Once it is run, the virus will attempt to infect the system. For non-"admin" users, it will prompt for the computer's administrator password in order to gain the privilege to edit the system configuration. It doesn't infect applications on disk, but rather when they are loaded, by using a system facility called "apphook." By default, user accounts run as non-admin, unless explicitly logged with the 'admin' login. Leap only infects Cocoa applications, and it does not infect applications owned by the system (including the apps that come pre-installed on a new machine), but only apps owned by the user who is currently logged in. Typically, that means apps that the current user has installed by drag-and-drop, rather than by Apple's installer system. When an infected app is launched, Leap tries to infect the four most recently used applications. If those four don't meet the above criteria, then no further infection takes place at that time. Once activated, Leap then attempts to...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=409589