Trojan.KillAV.E

I would consider myself a fairly savvy denizen of the internet but having been on a Mac OSX platform for the better part of the last decade, I have become a bit lazy when it comes to computer security. I trawl the deep web with nary a concern for viruses or malware. Even my phishing spidey sense has started to atrophy.

A few weeks ago, I received a text informing me that I had won a $50 dollar gift card to [REDACTED]. I haven't shopped at [REDACTED] in over a year but a recent New York Times article discussed how [REDACTED] was using predicative technology to lure shoppers so my brain made the leap that maybe this was one of their new promotions. Or, my brain continued to rationalize, maybe my parents had entered my number in some contest and simply never bothered to tell me. As I was getting ready to send a response, it finally dawned on me that our last sacred bastion, the cell phone, had finally been conquered by spammer barbarians.

I was further humbled by the latest news about the Mac specific trojan Flashback. For the past few weeks as I surfed the web, a pop up would appear pestering me to update Adobe Flash. The first few times, I didn't even bother reading it; I saw the Adobe logo and just swatted it down like some pesky fly. But after the umpteenth time, my patience reservoir was exhausted and I blindly hit update. Thus as I read an article detailing how Flashback baited users by masquerading as a Flash installer, my heart dropped. I had secretly laughed at all those suckers who fell for MacDefender, yet here I was scraping humble pie off of the floor like some common n00b. My mind raced as thought of all of the websites I was going to have to change my password on. Yet by some mysterious grace, I had been spared: when I ran the defaults read command in Terminal, my computer came up clean. It turns out it actually had been Adobe all along.

I guess it's better to be lucky than smart.