Malicious "Trojan horse" software has been knocking on the doors of Macintosh computers in a rare, easy to deflect attack, US Internet security experts said on Monday.
The "malware" is referred to as "Leap-A" or "Oompa Loompa" and arrives in messages that pretend to have photos only a computer aficionado might covet, that of Macintosh's new OS X operating system.
"The thing that interested everyone was that this was the first malicious piece of software mounted against OS X in a while," said computer security analyst Ray Wagner of Gartner Inc.
"As a piece of malware, it wasn't much to speak of. It even had a bug in it," he said.
Recipients that opened the file freed the malicious software, which sent itself to addresses on the infected computer's contacts list, according to security specialists.
The "oompa loompa" portion of the malware inadvertently gummed up programs, resulting in a need to re-install computer applications, Wagner said.
It has not been labeled a virus because the software does not replicate itself automatically; rather it relies on "social engineering" to trick computer users into allowing it into their machines.
"It's not very sophisticated," Ambrosia Software Inc president Andrew Welch wrote on a company message board online. "I'd really be tempted to call this thing a non-event."
"It's poorly written, can't spread beyond your local network, is unlikely to infect anything on most machines, and needs user interaction to do anything at all," he wrote.
There were only "a handful of infestations" reported worldwide, but they got attention because it is rare that malware targets Macintosh computers, said computer security specialist Michael Haro of Taiwan-based Trendmicro.com.
"There have been so few Apple viruses in the past decade, that we don't bother to make a scanner for them," Haro said.
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