Apple + Security & Privacy

UPDATE: About 8 hours after posting the information below, the site is off-line. It is likely to remain so.

A curious web site has popped up: Miguel García Carmen’s site selling a Mac OS X virus. This person seems a bit megalomaniacal, writing, “MIGUEL GARCÍA CARMEN, this is the name APPLE will have to engrave in stone and STEVE JOBS will never forget, since this man has been the first to ever make such a file that when you uncompress it, it KO’s the system and Hard Drive. ” (The site in question is in Spanish; we have translated the text to present it here. Also, the site was created on July 21, the day the domain hosting it was registered.)

This person claims to have created a system virus that affects Mac OS X. “The goal of this file is to demonstrate after so many hours of work that it is actually possible to harm the latest Leopard 10.5.4 operating system.” But rather than give this information to Apple, or to other security researchers, Carmen is auctioning it off. (As of this writing, the highest bid is EUR 4,778, or $7,606.) Like something out of a bad spy novel, he claims that, “The file will be delivered in person and a test will be performed in front of the buyer so he can verify it is not a fraud.” Hmm… We wonder.

Carmen includes a video on the site, which shows something happening after he extracts a Zip archive. The hard disk icons on the desktop of his Mac flash; what that means, we don’t know, but we’ll stay on top of this in case Carmen is telling the truth.

(FWIW, we made PDFs of the web pages on the site, and copies of the site’s whois records, in the case that the site would go off-line…)