A new trojan horse variant has been found in pirated versions of Adobe’s latest version of the Photoshop suite, security researchers warned Monday. The trojan horse is considered a “serious” security risk, opening Macs to malicious takeover by remote users.
The Trojan horse, OSX.Trojan.iServices.B, is included in Photoshop CS4 cracking software distributed on file-sharing networks such as BiTorrent, according to security software developer Intego.
“The actual Photoshop installer is clean, but the Trojan horse is found in a crack application,” Intego announced in a statement.
Nearly 5,000 people have downloaded the pirate installer as of 6 a.m. Eastern, the company said.
The crack installs a backdoor in /var/tmp/ and then requests the administrator’s password, launching a backdoor. That backdoor connects to two Internet addressess, allowing the hacker to remotely control a Mac, including downloading infected Mac software.
Just days before, a previous version of the Trojan used infected Macs to conduct distributed denial of service attacks. Since the latest version contacts the same Internet servers, there may be a similar motive, according to the firm.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
