Intego's Trojan: It's All Hooey

Here we are nearly a month since Christmas and my first blog of the year brings news of a new artificial trojan scare to the world of Mac users.

You may have been reading the headlines and stories at various Mac sites like MacNN and others about a trojan that has been added to the iWork '09 installation package and is being distributed over P2P networks.

First, let me say that no such trojan is running about the Mac community. Intego, a small and somewhat insignificant anti-virus software company, have been the only company to announce this so-called horrible trojan. Please understand here that any company selling anti-virus software for the Mac community is living a very lonely life and are preying on the fear of naive Mac users to induce sales or generate income for themselves.

It all started last week when Intego announced they had found a trojan called DNS Changer in the installation package of iWork '09. Not only was this not good and a great way to scare the Mac community, this was not good for Apple - the maker of iWork '09. For it looked as though Apple was to blame. Intego, of course, came to the rescue of Apple and announced the trojan was being distributed over the P2P networks like PirateBay, MiniNova and BTJunkie. Intego continued their onslaught of press releases claiming some 20,000 P2P users had downloaded the trojan and were spreading it among their peers.

So... PirateBay, MiniNova and BTJunkie put up an online survey to ask Mac users who had downloaded the iWork '09 package if they had found such a trojan on their systems. The response was no. Hummmm.... so 20,000 people who had downloaded and installed iWork '09 failed to report a trojan on their systems after installation? NO ONE had found this trojan?

A week later Intego announced the trojan had spread to the Mac version of Photoshop and again, was being distributed over the P2P network and that 5,000 people were now infected. Of course, none of those 5,000 people could verify Intego's claim but Intego was getting a lot of traction and plenty of new sales based upon their announcements.

Today we find the makers of MacScan want part of the pie too so they are promoting a 20% off coupon to all MacWorld attendees who received their free trial version of MacScan at the recent conference.

Interesting: Whether you know it or not Apple released iWorks '09 without the requirement of a serial or registration code. The program will install completely on your system and work beautifully without paying the $79 fee. A brilliant stroke on the part of Apple because it ensures their amazing KeyNote, Numbers and Pages (to the Microsoft world this would be PowerPoint, Excel and Word) is handed out freely. iLife '09 is being released today. Look for it at your favorite storefront.

Here's the bottom line Mac readers: OS X is Apple's pride and joy. Apple is like a fierce cat when it comes to protecting their child. If there ever is a serious threat to the Mac operating system you can believe Apple will not only alert the Mac community but will release their own free anti-virus program to remove, protect and defend their pride and joy. They would be fools if they didn't and we all know that Apple is no fool.