[sclitheroe]

I'm not defending Apple here, but I'm surprised how big a deal people are making about the current directives in place around the genius bar staff and Apple telephone support. This current uptick in malware is a very recent event, and they are no doubt working to standardize their support response.

This particular malware is easy to remove, but when you have hundreds (thousands?) of support staff across hundreds of stores, you need to make sure your staff are doing maintenance that is reliable, 100% effective and comprehensive, and consistent from location to location. You can't have some "geniuses" being the malware gurus while others struggle to remove the same malware, at the same store or the one on the other side of town.

I bet Apple is working the issue on several fronts, including determining the extent to which AppleCare and the 1 year warranty support covers remediation, a consistent communication strategy for customers, and probably even in-house tools similar to Microsoft's MRT, which allow support staff to deal with the infection in an automated way.

This doesn't absolve Apple for not having these kinds of plans and strategies in place in advance, nor do I think its 100% out of the realm of possibility that their support ends at the OS, and Apple will leave people dangling (their security and security management track record is not anything to brag about, despite the reputation) but I do think its a little unreasonable to expect the company to be able to respond at the drop of a hat.

On another tangent, although I bet overall self-infection rates are probably quite low, I saw the popup for this malware for the first time ever today, via a poisoned google image search for simple background textures I could use for an iPad wallpaper - it's clearly in the wild quite a bit more than the naysayers are claiming.

It's also interesting that ESET's Mac product product picked up on it immediately. I tested running the payload on my wife's computer (heh...I had a SuperDuper image, not to worry), and ESET correctly identified and quarantined the payload, so at least we know that there are security products out there that are up to the task at this point in time.

I've been running ESET on my Macs for about 2 months now, mostly to ensure my Macbook, which I use at home and at work, is a good corporate citizen. It's a common theme actually at work - as an example, we'll debate the merits of installing antivirus/malware software on Linux servers, and we always come down to the same conclusion - it's too inexpensive, and too simple a step, and too beneficial from a policy and liability perspective, to not use the tools available.