About the iWork ’09 Trojan
As you probably know by now, the DMG disk image of iWork that’s circulating on Bit Torrent has a trojan in it that infects the Mac and then tries to connect to remote machines to do a DDOS attack on them. To my knowledge, it’s the first Mac “virus” that actually managed to make a splash and that actually tries to do something evil. At this point, the reports online are talking about 20,000 infected machines.
There’s a couple of things to mention here. First, this might finally make people realize that the Mac OS X operating system is not secure. Now before you get upset at me, I do realize it’s a much better architecture than a typical Windows version, but as this trojan shows, regardless of what the OS does, there’s nothing you can do to prevent user stupidity. And yes, I do consider downloading a random disk image from a random server somewhere and installing it (while, of course, giving the installer your admin password) stupid.
The second thing is that this really shows to me that no matter what businesses do, some people will always pirate the software. In the gaming industry, there’s a lot of arguments from pirates that games are pirated because the DRM is obstrusive and that if they would remove the user annoyances they would buy it. In this case, Apple removed the only “protection” on their $79 office suite — a serial number — so that it’s easier for the buyers and the first thing people do is upload the disk image to the net and at least 20,000 people then download the image.
That’s just sad. What’s the reasoning behind this? It’s not as if the office suite is overpriced. It’s not as if it comes with DRM that will annoy you a lot. It’s not as if it comes from a company we hate.
No, it’s just that some people will steal just about anything online because unlike in the real world, they get to do it anonymously.
