Online game disguised as Space Invaders hits Mac users with trojan

Mac users have been warned of a new threat cleverly disguised as a classic video game.

Symantec's senior information developer Ben Nahorney claimed that the trojan downloaded, detected as Trojan.Loosemaque, is designed to look like a Space Invaders/Galaga style game. However, for every alien ship the user destroys, the program deletes a file from the home directory.

This latest online game is one of many disguised threats. Previously, games have been spread via social networking mirroring the popularity of the former Scrabulous game on Facebook. Symantec claimed that online games are increasingly becoming a target for virus creators, and this threat shows it is a possibility regardless of the platform.

Nahorney said: “Threats targeting the Macintosh platform are much less common than those targeting Windows. The same can be said about video games, where Windows is the dominant platform of the two. Combining games and malware has happened before, but a Mac game performing malicious activities? That's something relatively new.

“What's interesting is that the author of this ‘game' flat-out says what it does on his website. Reading through the author's description, it seems that he has created this game/threat as some sort of artistic project. The aliens are your files and there are consequences for ‘killing' them. However, if you die, the game is supposed to delete itself.

“Each file of your home directory appears only once, and the author seems to suggest that not destroying any ships may end up with positive consequences. (We were unable to discover if this was the case, as the game crashes before reaching the end.)”

See original article on scmagazineuk.com