New Mac trojan disguises itself like Space Invaders

published 4 November 2009

Researchers have discovered a trojan aimed at Macs that disguises itself as a Space Invaders or Galaga type game, and deletes a file from your home directory for every alien that you kill.

A Symantec engineer from Tokyo unveiled the threat, which the security company called OSX.Loosemaque'. For every alien ship that you blow up, files from the document folder disappear first, followed by preferences files contained within various sub folders in the user's home directory.

The game crashes after a while, which Symantec suggests is because it goes after a critical file.

The author of the game/malware says exactly what it does on his website, and was possibly created as an "artistic project" according to Ben Nahorney, a researcher writing on the Symantec Connect blog.

But he warned: "There's nothing stopping someone with more malicious intentions from modifying it slightly and then passing it on to unsuspecting computers, causing significant damage to a computer."

Below is a video of the trojan in action.

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