Recent Threats to Mac OS X Analyzed: Minimal Risks Confirmed

At first blush, the past two weeks have not been good for the image of Apple's Mac OS X: Public descriptions of two worms and a trivial exploit for a serious software issue in the operating system appeared on the Internet.

However, the three programs are hardly a threat to systems running Mac OS X, according to security professionals. One worm, known as OSX/Leap.A and assigned CME-4 by the Common Malware Enumeration Project, requires too much user interaction, hobbling its attempts to spread. A second worm, dubbed InqTana, and its two variants are actually proof-of-concept programs that were not discovered on the Internet but were instead sent to antivirus vendors and Apple by a researcher to prove that worms can spread through Bluetooth. And while the release of code for a vulnerability that could be exploited through Safari and Mail is a bit more serious, no incidents of Web sites exploiting the flaw have yet been reported.

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