One of its (and other packages out there) major purposes and functions is to detect malware and viruses. If a Mac or a PC is running a vulnerable service they are both possible to - I will need to respectively disagree with you about "Sophos.is not designed to detect malware." Contrary to popular belief, the idea that a Mac is more or less secure than a 'PC' is a fallacy. Side Note: You ask in the title " on a mac". After this point, the attackers could do whatever they wanted to her laptop including installing malicious software.
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Less likely, but still possible, is that they may have used a zero-day exploit - one for which there currently is no patch available. Next, the link she clicked probably took her to a page that attempted a browser exploit, an attack on adobe flash, or against whatever your girlfriend hadn't updated recently. Even though your University scans the links and e-mails for viruses, if the attacker is using a legitimate site to attack then the university will let it happen.
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To prevent this from happening in the future make sure she understands the importance of updates, and how to spot and avoid phishing scams.Ī lot of attackers will use shortened URLs or legitimate websites with XSS vulnerabilities in them. Re-install OSX and then change all her passwords. Update: I forgot to mention, she also had Sophos installed. They are worried that she has a rootkit virus. This seems wrong to me - how could the laptop be infected, if all she did was click a link in an email via webmail? Is that even possible? (I expect she was probably using Firefox). Now IT services is telling her to reinstall everything (Mac OS X, files etc) on her laptop before they agree to re-activate her university account. Anyway, changing one password changes the whole thing. How is this possible? Her Exchange account is linked to the university's central account system, but I'm not sure how exactly. She did NOT fill in any form that asked for her email address or password.ĭespite changing her password, the attackers did not stop. Apparently, the link "did nothing" and closed immediately. After a while, her email account must've hit some kind of limit, and the university server started sending her an email for every email that the spammer attempted to send from her account!Īnyway, she remembers accidentally clicking a phishing link in an email in webmail on her MacBook Pro that claimed to be an email from the university's IT Services, but that's all. The attacker took over her email account and started using it to send thousands of spam emails. My girlfriend recently had her university MS Exchange account hacked.