Is it a noun or a verb? Is the vowel sound ‘’ar” as in “Car” or “or” as in “Walk”? These are all mysteries, but lets face it, some things don’t really matter that much in the grand scheme of things. I love to chat about macs!Īnd what on earth does ‘sqwarq’ mean, anyway? My email is here, and you can follow me on Twitter If you want to know more about me, my products, or how to keep your mac out of troubled waters, just drop me a line. This is not true of almost all other security/troubleshooting software that you’ll find for macOS (which, of course, also isn’t sandboxed), and it’s one of the main philosophical and – perhaps more importantly – practical differences in my approach compared to other developers in the same field.įeel free to ask. But a newly discovered vulnerability broke through most of macOS’ newer. That’s an extra level of safety for users because it means that even if an attacker were to hijack my code, they couldn’t gain access to root privileges to take over your system. Apple has spent years reinforcing macOS with new security features to make it tougher for malware to break in. What that means is that my apps, unlike almost all other security and troubleshooting software, do not require Admin (aka ‘root’) privileges to install. Because my apps aren’t sandboxed, I take the extra precaution of having them run only in ‘user space’. There are many more ways to infect a Mac and steal data now. For many years Mac users were able to boast that Macs cant get malware. Imagine trying to referee a football game but not being allowed to interact with the players! That, in a nutshell, is why my apps aren’t sandboxed, and why – as a result – they’re not in the App Store. Malware is software that is specifically designed to disrupt, damage, or gain unauthorized access to a computer system. A troubleshooting app, though, needs to communicate with the processes that are causing trouble. Obviously, word processors, image editors and games don’t need access to other apps, and that’s why you’ll find many of those kinds of apps in the App Store. The App Store requires apps to be ‘sandboxed’, which in basic terms means they can’t talk to other apps, they can only “play on their own”. Why aren’t your apps in the Apple App Store? All my apps are codesigned with my Apple Developer signature, and if you have your mac on default Gatekeeper security settings, all will pass Gatekeeper when you download and install them. You can keep the software and use it again at no charge, or trash it (though I’d love to hear from you about what went wrong if things didn’t work out!). If you think the product has done a good job, then feel free to buy a registration key. ASC (as it is widely known) changed format sometime around 2014, and I moved away to focus on developing software solutions to the problems I saw users repeatedly encountering with their macs. I started learning my craft on Apple Support Communities back when, and learned pretty much everything I know about Apple macs by spending anything between 2 and 12 hours-a-day voluntarily ‘manning the boards’ for nearly five years. I’ve been doing it since 2013, and I’ve been troubleshooting macs since 2009. “The buck stops here” simply because it’s got nowhere else to go! I do get a helping hand from a few (largely) unpaid (except in beer) but richly-thanked volunteers with marketing, design and light admin duties, but if you’re ever conversing with ‘someone from Sqwarq’, it’ll be me. Either here or elsewhere, I tend to slip into referring to Sqwarq as a ‘we’, as in ‘what we do is make troubleshooting software’, but really it’s mostly just me. MACOS MALWARE YEARS RUNONLY AVOID FIVE HOW TO. I’m basically a one-man-band independent software developer, troubleshooter and blogger (over on my other site, ). "The fact that this new Linux malware toolset has been in the wild for the better part of the last decade without having been detected and publicly documented prior to this report makes it highly probable that the number of impacted organizations is significant and the duration of the infections lengthy.If you’re here, you probably have some questions about Sqwarq, so let me introduce myself. "This report detailed how this quintet of threat actor groups have managed to successfully infiltrate and maintain persistence on servers that comprise the backbone of the majority of large data centers using a newly identified Linux malware toolset obfuscated by a kernel-level module rootkit, all of which allows them to remain nearly undetectable on the infected systems," the report read. Since users install the pirated software themselves, this bypasses Mac OS protections.Īnd interesting that it went undetected for five years. Named OSAMiner, the malware has been distributed in the wild since at least 2015 disguised in pirated (cracked) games and software such as League of Legends and Microsoft Office for Mac, security firm SentinelOne said in a report published this week.
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