The new Mac Trojan variant OSX.Trojan.iSerices.B, detected last Thursday, is found in the crack application bundled with copies of Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Mac. While the actual Adobe Photoshop installer is bug-free, the Trojan embeds itself into a crack application that serializes the program, Intego said. After downloading the pirated Photoshop, the crack application extracts an executable from its data, then installs a backdoor in a file directory, which is not deleted when the computer reboots. If the user runs the crack application again, the Trojan creates another executable with a different name, making the malware more difficult to trace and safely remove.

It might be time to install Avast if you’re hanging around nasty sites. There’s a huge difference between anti-virus and anti-malware. There’s not a lot of descriptive notes on Avast’s effeciency with new threats of the Trojan category. Give it a try and if it slows you’re system down too much, start acting defensively with safe behaviour (no visit to illicit sites, no clicking on attachments from strangers, no downloading of strange PDFs or software, no execution of jpegs and mpegs with browsing software, change root password every month, no getting your emails from public places without changing your user passwords afterwards).

What you might also do is create a web browsing user without administrative privileges, disable Javascript, use Firefox (especially good at phishing detection).