Intego Advises to be On Guard for MacGuard

by , 1:00 PM EDT, October 17th, 2008

Intego, as part of its routine security alerts, has sent out an advisory warning Apple customers to be wary of a rogue security program called MacGuard. The software itself may be dangerous, and also may simply be harvesting credit card numbers, Intego said.

The advisory said, in part: "Intego has discovered a rogue program claiming to be Macintosh antivirus software. MacGuard claims that it will 'search your hard drive for malicious objects such as Adware, Spyware and Trojans, cleaning your files, eliminating the threats, and securing your privacy in just a matter of minutes.' However, the description of this software is merely a clone of a well-known Windows rogue security software tool that has been proven to be malicious. The software may be dangerous to Mac OS X, and there is a risk that the company 'selling' this software may be scamming users and some sources suggest that they may be using the credit card numbers they harvest for nefarious purposes. Pandalabs suggests that there may be 30 million computer users (essentially Windows users) infected by such rogue software.

"MacGuard's web site is the same as the site of Winiguard (with the word 'Windows' replaced by 'Mac OS X'), which is both a scam that attempts to sell useless software and a dangerous rouge tool that 'hijacks the user's desktop and typically displays exaggerated or false claims of spyware found to frighten the user into paying for the program,' according to Sunbelt Malware Research Labs."

The Website appears to be a hastily converted version of the Winiguard site and has several earmarks of a suspicious site. An Apple logo is sloppily pasted over a Dell computer, and the language on the site is confusing and contains many typos.

For more information, visit Intego's blogsite.