The violent protests by activists unhappy with the results of the recently concluded Iran presidential elections are being paralleled by DDoS attacks organized by hacktivists to bring down Iran government websites.

Although it hasn’t been confirmed if the DDoS attacks were indeed successful, several Iranian government websites have been reported inaccessible. Noah Shachtman from Wired expressed his concerns about Iran’s network infrastructure being centralized, which causes Internet connection across the country to normally be unstable as it is. Unnecessary, overwhelming traffic caused by the attacks may affect Internet access not only for those actually targeted by the DDoS, but pretty much every one else in Iran.

The centralization of Iran’s network also enabled the blockage of certain websites, which left people using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, in order send out information to outside Iran. Twitter, most especially, was used as the main channel for people to post information, and was even forced to reschedule a planned maintenance just to keep the channel open to the people who are rallying information to and from Iran.

Calling for attacks for the sake of getting their messages across is an action far from actually causing any positive development in the situation. The only thing these hacktivists are succeeding in is making things worse. So please, do not participate in any of these activities.

The Web has been a convenient avenue for activists to express their beliefs, all of which affecting not only those targeted by the attacks, but other users as well.

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Two new malware for Mac OS X were recently discovered. Even though there are indeed relatively fewer Mac malware compared with Windows, many Mac users who still believe they are somehow magically immune from attacks may run the risk of encountering any of these two.

One of the newest Mac OS X malware, a Trojan detected as OSX_RSPLUG.C may be unknowingly downloaded by a user while visiting malicious websites. The said websites encourage users to download a software that is needed to play a promised hardcore pornographic video, which is actually a Trojan that renders your computer easy prey to hackers. It arrives as a .DMG file and contains a .PKG file. When executed, it displays the following GUI installation window:

While the said application is being installed in the background, it also executes BASH scripts obfuscated by an SED command. The said scripts drop files that set up a cron job to run a component file. It also executes a PERL script that allows the malware to connect to servers to download and execute other scripts. This modifies the settings of the computer’s DNS servers and redirects users to virtually any site of the cybercriminals’ choice. Users find themselves being led to phishing sites or sites where other malware can be downloaded.

As if one malware is not enough, another malware OSX_RSPLUG.E has also been detected. Just like the first malware, the software that comes with the prompt is also a Trojan that follows pretty much the same routine and has the same payload. The only difference being, apart from being obfuscated by an SED command, the malware’s execution is also obfuscated by a UUEncode program.

Trend Micro’s Smart Protection Network already detects OSX_RSPLUG.C and OSX_RSPLUG.E and provides solutions for their cleanup and removal.