Gullible tempted with ‘free’ Snow Leopard, get trojan instead

If a deal seems to good to be true, especially if it involves giving the unaware Apple’s Mac OS X 10.6 crown jewels, then it probably comes with a malware payload. But, hey, it’s the early 21st Century and people should already know this stuff, right?

Quoting Advanced Threat Researcher Feike Hacquebord, Trend Micro reports that there were a number of fake sites offering free copies of Snow Leopard. Instead getting the goods, downloaders purportedly get infected with a fresh variant of the DNS changer trojan lyrically dubbed OSX_JAHLAV.K.

As if that weren’t enough, some victims purportedly were redirected by this malware to a Web site pushing scareware (fake antivirus) “products,” which harass and harangue users until they pay for the software to remove the “infection” detected. Of course, there’s only one infection which ironically is the source of warnings, threats, etc. to buy the bogus antivirus application.

Now how much would you pay for a free copy of Snow Leopard?

And, lest you think the folks at Trend Micro are a bunch selfless Samaritans, the punchline here is that their Smart Surfing for Mac, which sells for $50 a year, blocks the malicious URLs.

Thereupon, as always, the take away here is not to download warez, avoid dodgy porn sites (i.e. 99 percent of porn sites), be nice to small animals and get some (free) antivirus software, run it and keep it fresh…

What’s your take?

• Snow Leopard has integrated anti-trojan horse feature
• Russian hackers pay 43 cents per hijacked Mac
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• Apple’s $29 Snow Leopard DVD is the full meal deal
• Mac security: ClamXav 2.0.1 beta brings Snow Leopard compatibility