Help needed from Hacking/Security/Hardware Savvy Mac User

Hello everyone!

I'm on the home straight of finishing off writing the plot outline for a psychological thriller. Without giving anything about the novel away I need some help with some of the technical issues involved with getting malware onto a Mac. I appreciate Macs are very secure, etc and I'm not suggesting they aren't. This is fiction after all. Anyway, is there anyone on this forum with a good knowledge of OS X, hacking, security and hardware. I would just need to email you a few times. I have a basic idea of what I need to know and imagine the right person would not need to spend much time answering my questions. I'm fairly computer savvy myself and have a degree in Computing but this kind of thing is not my forte (what I mean is you won't be educating a technophobe).

I'm afraid I'm just asking a favour here and can't offer any money for your time.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

I don't know if you will be able to get some help here. I don't think there is any malware for OS X. The only way I know to infect OS X is to install windows in another partition.

I know a little, so PM me if you like.

You could easily get Maleware onto a Mac, if it is written o be executed by the OS. The hard part is getting the user to voluntarily execute the code. The user would have enter their password to install the malicious code. There was a QT bug recently that did this but it didn't get far because of the requirement to enter a password to install the code.

Three replies already - thank you!

Let's define what I mean by malware. Like I say, this is not my forte so I may have the jargon wrong. I take malware to mean any software that is malicious. In which case, if I were an expert C coder and knew something about Darwin Unix and OS X I can write and run some malicious software on a Mac if I had the means to install it (e.g. I could put it on my own if I were stupid enough). However difficult it is, in the real world it is at least possible.

Okay, I think I can narrow this down (and remember you don't know the context of the novel so it may sound improbable but that's no problem). Is the following possible with Macs:

Since most Macs of the same generation use the same hardware - or at least limited range of hardware (compared to PCs) - would it be possible to remove a hard drive and install the malware on it via another Mac (i.e. a straight hard drive replacement) if you knew the root password?

DrQuincy said:

Since most Macs of the same generation use the same hardware - or at least limited range of hardware (compared to PCs) - would it be possible to remove a hard drive and install the malware on it via another Mac (i.e. a straight hard drive replacement) if you knew the root password?

Click to expand...

Absolutely. You wouldn't even have to boot the drive or even know it's password. You could physically remove the drive and stick it an external case and mount it on another Mac. If you plug it into a machine that you already have the password for you could install onto the drive in question only by using your password.

Heck, you could plug another Mac (a laptop would work wonderfully for this) into the Mac in question and boot it into Target Firewire mode and install it from the second machine with no password for the original machines drive required.

All of this requires physical access to the machine in question. This is a lot harder to do that spreading it via the web.

This is really useful to me and I think I have enough for now. Thanks very much everyone.