Please Help - I might have a Key-Logger on My Mac...

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Hi everyone.

I woke up this morning to find thatmost of the folks on my yahoo e-mail account contact list had been send spam. Here is the thing, checking my yahoo account, non of the spam shows in my sent folder. I think I might have a keylogger on my Mac (27" Imac running OSX). I normally run Sophos in the background, but that has not picked anything up.

can anyone suggest a good tool to scan the mac and detect any possible keyloggers and a way to remove them?

Thanks in advance for all your help.
 
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There are definitely no keyloggers on your Mac (because no such things exist as yet for Macs, unless you installed it yourself). As such, Sophos won't pick anything up. It's more likely that your yahoo account was hacked.

Clamxav is another scanner you could try for peace of mind.
 
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Actually Northrnchimp, there are OS X keyloggers. We used on where I work on a server machine because we didn't want people using it. With the keylogger we could tell exactly who was using it.

I would guess that you probably don't have a keylogger install, but your yahoo mail account got hacked. I had it happen to my gmail account once and the same thing happened.
 
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Thanks guys.

I'm starting to think that the Mac is not infected. The more I think about it, the admin account is definitely not compromised, and software can't install in the mac without specific admin authorization (at least in most cases). That and my yahoo account shows no spam e-mails in the sent folder (which s the default setting), but shows recently sent e-mails from after the spam was delivered

Between the lack of e-mails in my sent folder, the mac's structure, and no other account seemingly compromised, I'm thinking that the contact list has been compromised elsewhere.

Hmmm.... Yahoo???

Anyhow, I changed the password on the account so hopefully that puts an end to that.

Thanks guys.

__________________________________


BTW, while we are on the subject, is there anything better than Sophos for the mac that you guys might recommend for passive security? I'm a linux guy so I'm familiar with they why's and hows of MacOS security relative to other OS. The computer is behind a mechanical firewall and I don't do anything crazy on it (plus most of my surfing is on FF4 or Chrome, not Safari), plus my user account is intentionally not an admin account.

My wife on the other hand, uses the same rig and insists on making her user account an admin account, despite my protests. Her security habits are not as good as mine so I insist on the machine having passive security.

Any recommendations would be appreciated.

Thanks again
 
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There are no Mac OS X viruses and few trojans. Safe browsing techniques is the best defense, and if you feel you must for sure use ClamXav. Avoid programs such as Mac Defender, Mac Security, CleanMyMac etc.

Best maintenance program is Onyx which is freeware.

Regarding Sophos, Nortons etc keep them well away. You pay to download PC virus definitions which cannot operate on the Unix platform and here are no Mac OS X viruses so no definitions. Have a read of this thread:-


http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/sw...-official-antivirus-malware-firewall-faq.html
 
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Actually Northrnchimp, there are OS X keyloggers.

Yes Stretch, that's why I said "no such things exist as yet for Macs [meaning Malware as he thought it was], unless you installed it yourself"
 

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