Ex-Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki’s Twitter feed has been used to spread a Mac Trojan.
Kawasaki’s popular feed, which has 140,000 subscribers, included a link on Tuesday night to a what purported to be a sex tape featuring Gossip Girl actress Leighton Meester. However, the link pointed to the OSX/Jahlav-C Trojan, a rare Mac Trojan that has popped up recently on a couple of porno websites.
Kawasaki said the link was the result of leaving his feed open to “user generated” stories.
“Here’s the scoop,” Kawasaki said by email to CoM. “I used Twitterfeed to insert the Truemors feed into my tweets (Here’s the feed). I thought that was a 100% safe, moderated feed, but I now know it isn’t. ‘User generated’ stories can get inserted into that feed. The bottom line is that my Twitter account wasn’t hacked; Twitter-Twitterfeed was all working right. It’s just that a bad story got into the feed that was refed by me.
“My short career as a pornographer lasted 45 minutes. :-)”
Graham Cluley, a spokesman for Sophos, a British security firm which first publicised the malware tweet, said it was the first time he’d heard of Twitter being used to spread the Mac malware.
“Guy is the only person we’ve discovered by this attack, but it may just be that he’s the most high profile,” said Cluley.
However, Twitter has been used before to spread malware on Windows. In August, security firm Kapersky Labs warned of banking Trojans posing as porno tapes of Brazilian pop star Kelly Key.
“Of course, there is much more malware for Windows than Mac, and users have to give permission to install the code,” said Cluley. “Nevertheless a high profile Twitterer like Guy publishing the link could mean a higher number of victims.”
The OSX/Jahlav-C Trojan is what Sophos calls a “DNS changing Trojan,” and may attempt to download further malware from the net. What the malware might be, no one seems to have discovered yet. If anyone’s been infected on the Mac, they are not rushing forward to report what the payload does.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
