Virus - System Doctor

Using Safari, I am getting a virus that inserts a tile ad on web pages that asks me to click for info on "System Doctor." I never click on it. After a few moments, however, an Apple window pops up asking if I'd like to download System Doctor. Since cancel is an option on the window, I click it, and the window is replaced with another window that asks if I'd like to download the software. Only this window does not allow you to cancel and you cannot change to any other windows without clicking OK. When you click OK, the Apple download window (i.e. the one with the bar graph that pops up when you are downloading widets, etc), comes on and I click "no" when it asks if you want to download.

Then the System Doctor stuff goes away, temporarlily. It usually comes back a couple of minutes later and I have to go through the whole thing again. Frustrating!

On the Sophos web site it lists System Doctor as a Windows problem. I've got an iMac with the Motorola chip. Any ideas on how to get rid of this?

iMac with Motorola Chip, Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Posted on Nov 18, 2006 7:33 AM

Reply
8 replies

Nov 18, 2006 8:43 AM in response to baylake

Does Sophos AV work with Mac's?


Yes but I wouldn't waste your money on purchasing antivirus software at this point.

How bad a problem are viruses with Macs?


Not a problem with OS X. In fact, there are no known viruses that currently affect OS X which has been available for 6 years now. There has been plenty of discussion regarding if Leap-A falls under the definition of a virus or trojan (which requires user intervention as Leap-A does) but Sophos defines it as a virus because they are interested in sales of their product.

http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2006/02/macosxleap.html

OSX/Leap.A is a "worm" that spreads via iChat and by infecting applications.

It spreads using a gzip-compressed tar archive called "latestpics.tgz". The archive contains two files:

latestpics - a 39,596-byte executable
._latestpics - a 43,694-byte icon resource fork

The worm does not have an auto-execution mechanism: the only way for the worm to run is for a user to manually unpack the archive latestpics.tgz and execute the malicious code.

http://guides.macrumors.com/OSX/Leap-A

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Virus - System Doctor

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