It’s hard to find a computer or tech article these days that doesn’t mention the viruses, worms, and Trojan Horses designed to cripple computers and frustrate users. In this space I have chronicled, sometimes with a snicker, the woes of Windoze users who have contracted such digital miscreants. I’ve never experienced first-hand the Windoze “value added feature” of being security “swiss cheese”, but I have heard the lamentations of my friends. I count my bits and bytes blessings every day that my platform of choice hasn’t become a target. Whether it’s due to a small “market share”, or to tamper-resistant coding, we Mac users haven’t had to worry much about digital denizens of destruction.

Until now.

Yes, this week someone posted a file across the many peer-to-peer (P2P) file “sharing”sites (you know, the stuff I’ve been covering in articles over the last few months). The file was labeled something like “Office 2004 for Mac Demo”. As you know from last week’s column, Office 2004 for Mac has been released (to rave reviews, I might add). So, a demo of the software package appearing on a P2P network wouldn’t be too unusual. What should have seemed unusual to anyone contemplating downloading the “Demo” was the file size.

Before I continue, Microsoft has posted a real downloadable demo of Office 2004 on the web. It’s size – around 190 MB!

Anyway, the size of the Demo on the P2P networks was – 108 KB. Not quite the file size needed to contain the powerful Office suite. But, wait, it gets better.

After downloading, users who double-clicked the file got a big surprise. The file actually contained an AppleScript that told the Mac to delete all the files in the user’s Home folder. If you’re not familiar with Mac OS X, the Home folder contains all the personal files unique to the current user. Music, photos, address book, email, preferences, the like.

Now, before you good Windoze users start saying, “what goes around, comes around”, remember that this Trojan Horse-like nasty requires a pretty gullible action on the part of the user. It doesn’t propagate itself, get embedded in email, or erase the entire hard drive.

It does, however, remind us of the inherent dangers in spending a lot of time enriching your digital library via P2P file “sharing”. If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski