New Mac Trojan Hijacks Google Searches

[jamescv7]

Security researchers from F-Secure have identified a new Mac OS X click fraud trojan which hijacks Google searches by inserting a rogue DNS entry into the hosts file.

The trojan comes hidden as a Fake Player installer so it is probably distributed as part of a social engineering attack that asks users to update Flash Player to see a video or something similar.

Once run on the system, the trojan modifies the operating system's hosts file and inserts an entry that points all Google sites (www.google.*) to a rogue IP address under the attackers' control.

The hosts file can be used to manually specify DNS entries that take precedence over the responses sent by the system's DNS server.

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F-secure link

 

[Vextor]

Mac's have a HOST file?

 

[Hungry Man]

Yes. OSX, Linux, and Windows (all the way back past XP) all have host files.