TOKYO (MacHouse) – In the last article hosted at our SEO/Web Safety blog, we mentioned a disc image which we suspected contains a Trojan virus targeting Mac users. We sent this file, hqcodecvip1355.dmg, to security expert Sophos for a review. And they have confirmed to us that this disc image contains a Trojan’s derivative called ‘OSX/RSPlug-Gen.’ According to Sophos, it’s described as a malicious program which is designed to modify “the computer’s network settings,” “potentially causing the user’s web traffic to be redirected to malicious sites.” It’s also known as DNS Changer Trojan. hqcodecvip1355.dmg contains a DNS Changer Trojan that specifically targets Mac users. And there is another file from hqcodecvip.com. The file name is hqcodecvip1000.dmg. It’s possible that this file is also infected.

We appreciate Sophos for their quick response and for their finding.






Click on the button for more information on this Trojan virus.

TOKYO (MacHouse) – One of the scrap comments circulated by a spam terrorist whose IP address is shown as 90.156.169.211 is something that we could have easily missed. But we didn’t. In fact, all the four forwarding links except the last one are insignificant. (See Screenshot 01.) And the last forwarding link would lead Internet users all the way to a porn website where a possible trojan attack awaits them. Continue reading →

TOKYO (MacHouse) – We identified the first set of spam ads that were intended to direct Internet users to Mac-related websites in January 17. These spam ads indicated that two Mac-related websites, those of MacRumors (macrumors.com) and The Omni Group (omnigroup.com), were exploited for pharmacy spam. Today, a group of spam terrorists using various IP addresses including 87.69.76.164, 84.109.80.97, 84.109.80.111 and 84.109.108.147 circulated at least 10 spam comments in 10 hours to advertise spam posts appearing at forums.macrumors.com and forums.omnigroup.com. (See Screenshot 01-2) This large-scale spam ad circulation campaign started at 04:48 AM (US PST), January 23. Continue reading →