I'm not convinced they've got that right. When I'm back at my mac, I'll have a further look.

Why am I not surprised

Well, where else are they supposed to send people? You can't get Mac software in PC world - well, you might be able to find a dusty shelf with 3 versions out of date copies of office but that's about all - and we all know the quality of advice you get in there. They'd probably try to sell you some windows software. The only place on the 'high street' you can be certain to get up to date Mac software and where there will be people who have the first clue about macs is an Apple Shop. True there are also independent resellers, but not all of them deal with 'retail' and, frankly, some of them have less of clue than the PC world bods. I actually remember talking to an Apple rep to get some spares back before the Apple shops existed and the conversation went something like

Me: 'OK, it looks like I need <such and such a part>'
Appley bloke : 'Fine, we can post it to you or you should be able to get it from your local authorised reseller. Where are you?'
Me: <Tells AB my address>
AB : 'Right so your local reseller is...'
Me : <says name of local Apple seller>
AB : 'Yeah, it is isn't it.... <pause>..... we'll post it to you.'

I am kind of surprised they tell people to use the app store though. First of all, you don't want people typing in their app store password on a machine that may have been compromised and secondly the limitations of what you can sell on the app store means a virus scanner from there would have significant functionality problems.

Anyway : Ars Technica investigate the issue.

I was thinking along the lines getting the patch out and tell people to download it to get rid of the malware.

To be honest I blame Apple for this particular infection. They've been banging on about how "Apple don't have viruses" and people believed them. They have become careless and probably lack the basic education that most pc users have - "be careful, don't just click and download everything just cause it tells you to".

And that's the problem, Apple won't even acknowledge that malware is there so they don't lose their face:


Let's see if this will be the wake up call, both for Apple and for users.

How would a patch help? It doesn't exactly exploit anything on the system. If the user is using Chrome, Firefox, or Opera the website could still automatically download the file and ask the user to install it to get rid of malware.



Windows users are just as bad, as are those novice users of any OS. Everyone knows that to get on with your day you press "OK", "Accept", and "Yes", anything else will cause you to have to think.

What, rather than the people who wrote it? Genius.


I rather doubt it, I'm afraid. It would take a few instances of a nasty that spread to a significant section of the population to make people change their minds. This is true of both actual and virtual infections generally. It would take a concerted campaign to do so more quickly which, to be honest with you, would have be so far into scare-mongering it would almost be parody.

Put it this way... people kept having unprotected sex despite knowing that AIDS existed and it took a vast, expensive and frankly quite macabre public information campaign to change the minds of the majority and even then, it took a generation for the change to 'stick'. People never care about these things as much as they should until they're hit. And at that point, it's kind of too late for publicity anyway.

Jon

It would remove the malware, obviously users are struggling and Apple is pretending that they have nothing to do with this...


I don't agree! Viruses for Windows have always been here, users will be better educated. Apple pretended that it's users are safe...

Yes, but I am not going to keep explaining myself to you. You chose not to understand, I won't waste my time on you.

Smug, ill-informed idiots got what they deserved, they believed religiously the propaganda and now they are on their own! My heart bleeds!

*sigh*.

I can only see on smug, ill-informed idiot.
On their own in what sense?

You are lucky, you seem to work with people who know what they are doing. People at work (ranging from ~22 years old to ~50 years old) don't have a clue (as in they struggle to manage emails, get really confused if Word doesn't save the file to My Documents, etc.) , and this is typical of many people I come in to contact with at the university outside of computer science, and back home.

The vast majority of users are clueless regardless of what OS they are using. You only have to see the problems for Android users right now. Common sense helps alot, but that also seems in short supply at times.

So they're on their own... apart from any techy friends or relatives they may have to hand, any other commercial support mechanisms they may contact (such as they may be reliable) and the whole internet. Clearly a personal crisis entirely of Apple's making.

Jon

I wonder what say, MS or Ubuntu would say if I presented to one of their support techs and said 'I've installed something I shouldn't have and now it's being a nuisance, can you delete it for me?'