14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that the old saying is true and the apocalypse always strikes twice, because, just days after 'the first OS X virus', the second one is out.
This time labeled as a worm by most reports, rather than a virus, the treat proves to be just as laughable as the old one. "Inqtana-A" is the name of the culprit that spreads from Mac to Mac using a Bluetooth vulnerability (known as CAN-2005-1333).
"It's disturbing to see a second worm for Mac OS X so soon after the first, but it should be remembered that this is only two compared to well over 100,000 viruses for Microsoft operating systems," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "The good news is that Inqtana is not going to spread successfully in the wild, but this announcement will still be a shock to those in the Mac community who thought hackers were not interested in their operating system."
Much like Leap-A, Inqtana-A is more of a proof of concept than an actual worm, and has been labeled as such by both F-Secure and Symantec. The worm targets a security flaw that was patched by Apple in May 2005, and as such is very unlikely to spread at all seeing as how it has been obsolete for well over half a year.