IT-Review

"Renepo" Worm Attacks Mac OS X

Sophos is advising Mac OX S administrators of an anti-security worm known as "Renepo". The worm does not have prodigious spreading powers (for example, it does not use peer-to-peer sharing, email or instant messaging to spread), but is full of anti-security programming.

For example, Renepo will turn off the OS X firewall and other security software; will download and install hacker tools for password sniffing and cracking; will make key system directories world-writeable; and will create an admin-level user for later system abuse. Renepo also turns off accounting and logging to help hide its presence.

"You do not want this thing in your OS X network," said Paul Ducklin, Asia Pacific Head of Technology for Sophos. "Renepo makes such a wide range of security-related changes that all security bets are off once you have been compromised. Because Renepo attempts to harvest user, configuration and password data for a wide range of applications, including FTP servers, web servers, browsers, the VNC remote control program and the operating system itself, it represents a huge security headache rolled into a single shell script."

As Ducklin points out however, there is a silver lining: "The Renepo virus is not in the wild, and can therefore be considered a shot across the bows rather than a clear and present danger. Hopefully, its existence will be a timely warning to any Mac users who still assume they are safe because the Bad Guys aren't interested in the Mac platform."

Technical details, including detection and recovery instructions, are included below. This information is also available on-line at:

http://www.sophos.com.au/virusinfo/analyses/shrenepoa.html

Source: press release

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