Yet Another Pointless Worm(tm): Inqtana.A
It's like a leaky dam: It starts with one tiny little hole in the wall, then several more spring through. Before you know it, the whole dam has collapsed and the poor farm town down the road is nothing more than island rooftops and floating cows. What do you think happened to Atlantis, folks?
Following the discovery of one of Mac OS X's first "Trojan" worms (wink), Macworld was kind enough to point out another leak in our increasingly porous perimeter: a new proof-of-concept Java worm called Inqtana.A that "exploits a vulnerability in Bluetooth on some Macs that haven’t been updated with Panther and Tiger security patches."
I'll leave the gory details for Macworld to explain, but suffice to say that the malware loads onto your Mac, finds another machine via bluetooth and attempts to transfer itself. The user receiving the file does need to accept the transfer -- but it still self-propagates, technically classifying it as a worm. The good news, though, is that it doesn't seem to do much more than that.
Frankly, despite the sudden appearance of these proof-of-concept "leaks," I'm still betting that some clever animated superhero will pop a finger into the holes and seal 'em up before the dam bursts and we're forced to start new lives as ruffian mer-people. But there are only so many fingers and toes to go around before a leak's left unattended -- what happens then? Aquacalypse?
