Macs are now susceptible to viruses?

There have been Mac viruses for years, but apparently Mac users are just more creative and don’t have time to mess around with self-propagating viruses that cripple your computer.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), details what the virus really is and as usual, the Main-Stream-Media is late to the party:

Several people have emailed us to point out that CNN is featuring an AP story about the 'first Mac virus' on their front page. It looks like CNN is a little late to the party, since the Mac web already reported about this way back in February. Damien wrote that, 'The bottom line is that this really seems to be a proof-of-concept trojan more than an actual "in the wild, self-propagating" virus. So yeah, it's certainly very interesting, but I'm not about to start watching for the sky to fall.'

The virus detailed in the CNN story is (though they never call it by name) Oompa-Loompa, as coined by Andrew Welch. You get this trojan (it isn't really a virus) by downloading a file that promises to give you a sneak peek at Leopard. You must then decompress the file, and then click on the resulting decompressed file. At that point an application runs that does a variety of things that Andrew details much better than I can.

I wonder what took the AP so long to sensationalize this little 'virus'?

I’ve been a mac user for at least a decade, and have never had a virus. Go figure…