Jealous Author Mac OS
Jealous Author Mac OS
The Mac User 'Mindset Profile' On the other hand, also last winter, market research firm Mindset Media published a Mindset Profile of Mac users based on a study conducted using Nielsen's Online panel of 7,500 survey respondents. Mindset placed the typical Mac user in their 'Openness 5' category, defined as folks who. The 'Get a Mac' campaign is a television advertising campaign created for Apple Inc. (Apple Computer, Inc. At the start of the campaign) by TBWAMedia Arts Lab, the company's advertising agency, that ran from 2006 to 2009.The advertisements were shown in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Japan and Germany.
A year ago today, Apple released a software update to halt the spread of the Flashback worm, a malware strain that infected more than 650,000 Mac OS X systems using a vulnerability in Apple’s version of Java. This somewhat dismal anniversary is probably as good a time as any to publish some clues I’ve gathered over the past year that point to the real-life identity of the Flashback worm’s creator.
Before I delve into the gritty details, a little background on this insidious contagion is in order. A keenly detailed research paper (PDF) published last year by Finnish security firm F-Secure puts the impact and threat from Flashback in perspective, noting that the malware boasted a series of “firsts” for its kind. For starters, Flashback was the first OS X malware to be “VMware aware” — or to know when it was being run in a virtual environment (a trick designed to frustrate security researchers). It also was the first to disable XProtect, OS X’s built-in malware protection program. These features, combined with its ability to spread through a then-unpatched vulnerability in Java made Flashback roughly as common for Macs as the Conficker Worm was for Windows PCs.
- I have a macbook pro 15″ (late 2011) running OS Sierra with 128GB SSD in the main bay and a 1TB Toshiba MQ01ABD100 HDD Sata II (3Gb/s) in the optical bay. Both are formated as MAC OS Extended (Journaled).
- Also is the first one to show Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Tree Trimming —In another animated Get a Mac commercial for the holiday season, Mac and PC set aside their disagreements and decide to trim a Christmas tree by hanging ornaments and stringing lights. Mac tells PC that they are good friends, while PC gets nervous.
- Mac OS X & macOS names. As you can see from the list above, with the exception of the first OS X beta, all versions of the Mac operating system from 2001 to 2012 were all named after big cats.
“This means Flashback is not only the most advanced, but also the most successful OS X malware we’ve ever seen,” wrote F-Secure’s Broderick Ian Aquilino.
The F-Secure writeup answers an important question not found in other analyses: Namely, what was the apparent intended purpose of Flashback? Put simply: to redirect Google results to third-party advertisers, all for the author’s profit. It’s name was derived from the fact that it spread using a social engineering trick of presenting the OS X user with a bogus Flash Player installation prompt. F-Secure notes that this same behavior — both the Flash social engineering trick and the redirection to fake Google sites that served search results for third-party advertisers that benefited the author — was also found in the QHost malware, suggesting that Flashback may have been the next evolution of the Mac QHost malware.
BLACK SEO
A year ago, I published a series that sought to identify the real-lifehackersbehindthetopspambotnets. Using much the same methodology, I was able to identify and locate a young man in Russia who appears (and privately claims) to be the author of Flashback. As it happens, this individual hangs out on many of the same forums as the world’s top spammers (but more on that at another time).
Given Flashback’s focus on gaming Google’s ad networks, I suspected that the worm’s author probably was a key member of forums that focus on so-called “black hat SEO,” (search engine optimization), or learned in illicit ways to game search engines and manipulate ad revenues. Sure enough, this individual happens to be a very active and founding member of BlackSEO.com, a closely guarded Russian language forum dedicated to this topic.
Below is a screen shot taken from a private message between a “VIP” user named “Mavook” and a top forum member on BlackSEO.com. The conversation took place on July 14, 2012. A rough translation of their conversation is superimposed on the redacted screen grab, but basically it shows Mavook asking the senior member for help in gaining access to Darkode.com, a fairly exclusive English-language cybercrime forum (and one that I profiled in a story earlier this week).
BlackSEO.com member “Mavook” claims responsibility for creating Flashback to a senior forum member.
Mavook asks the other member to get him an invitation to Darkode, and Mavook is instructed to come up with a brief bio stating his accomplishments, and to select a nickname to use on the forum if he’s invited. Mavook replies that the Darkode nick should be not be easily tied back to his BlackSEO persona, and suggests the nickname “Macbook.” He also states that he is the “Creator of Flashback botnet for Macs,” and that he specializes in “finding exploits and creating bots.”
The senior member that Mavook petitions is quite well known in the Russian cybercrime underground, and these two individuals also are well known to one another. In fact, in a separate exchange on the main BlackSEO forum between the senior member and a BlackSEO user named JPS, the senior member recommends Mavook as a guy who knows his stuff and can be counted on to produce reliable attack tools.
In the conversation screen-shotted here to the left, JPS can be seen asking the senior forum member for recommendations about reliable individuals who sell unique exploit packs, software toolkits built to be stitched into hacked Web sites and exploit common Web browser vulnerabilities. JPS says he’s looking for a pro who can deliver decent exploitation rates.
Jealous Author Mac Os Catalina
“I have no time (and no desire) to roam chats and argue there with cool hackers,” JPS said. “I need to check traffic in terms of exploitability, and in the future, if everything is alright, I can work on a continuous basis” with the hired expert.
The senior member tells JPS to ask Mavook. “If Mavook won’t budge, saying that he is no longer doing this stuff, write to me again.”
WHO IS MAVOOK?
If we take a closer look at Mavook’s profile page on BlackSEO.com, we can see that he is a longtime member, dating back to 2005, when he was the 24th member registered on BlackSEO (out of thousands). Mavook’s profile also shows that his personal home page was at one time mavook.com. The WHOIS registration records for mavook.com have long been hidden by commercial WHOIS privacy protection services, but I found the original WHOIS record for this domain using the indispensable historic WHOIS service maintained by domaintools.com. Those records show that the domain was originally registered in 2005 by a Maxim Selikhanovich in Saransk, the capital city in Mordovia, a republic in the eastern region of the East European Plain of Russia.
The email address used to register mavook.com was “h0mini@mail.ru” (the second character in the address is a zero). A search for that email address in Skype’s user database brings up a user with the screen name “Maximsd”. Mavook also used the email address “mavook@gmail.com.” That address is tied a Maxim Selikhanovich in Saransk via the registration records for the now defunct Website saransk-offline.com, which at one point sold popular MP3 files for pennies apiece.
One of the emails used by Maxim for that Website and a related site was “troxel@yandex.ru,” which was the same email used to register a now-deleted Facebook account under a Maxim Selikhanovich from Saransk. Yet another abandoned music sales site — mavook-mp3.com — was registered to a “Mavook aka Troxel” and to the h0mini@mail.ru” address used for mavook.com.
MACS, MAX and MAKS
The final clue offers perhaps the most tantalizing details: The h0mini@mail.ru address is the contact point of record for a business in Saransk called mak-rm.com, the domain name registered to a IT-outsourcing and Web design firm in Saransk called the Mordovia Outsourcing Company (the “mak” part of the name comes from the Russian version of the company name, which is “МОРДОВСКАЯ АУТСОРСИНГОВАЯ КОМПАНИЯ”). That domain is registered to a “Max D. Sell” in Saransk (see a cached image from mak-rm.com’s homepage in 2010 at the Internet Archive).
According to a trusted source who has the ability to look up tax information on citizens and corporations in Russia, the Mordovia Outsourcing Company was registered and founded by one Maxim Dmitrievich Selihanovich, a 30-year-old from Saransk, Mordovia.
Dated back to the WWDC 2013, when Apple announced iBooks would be an independent application in the OS X 10.9 Mavericks, all the iBooks lovers are exciting about the coming iBooks for Mac app. Finally the day came, but I heard much noise among the cheers. A lot of people think the iBooks for Mac sucks, because it doesn't allow people to edit the metadata.
People can't edit eBooks metadata in iBooks for Mac
Some people may even don't know what is metadata, to put it simply, metadata is the ID card for an eBook, like the cover, title, author name, publisher name, etc.
For those people who purchase eBooks from iBooks Store only, they might feel there is no need to edit the metadata. But a hard-core eBook fan won't think so, many downloaded eBooks don't have a complete meta information, like lack of cover or improper title spelling.
When the iBooks was only a child-column in iTunes, we can right click on an item then click 'Get Info' to edit a book's metadata just like modifying a song's ID3 tag information.
But with iBooks for Mac in Mavericks, you only get this when right clicking on a book.
Sad story, feels like we are using a lite edition of iBooks, isn't it?
Mac Os Download
The reason that iBooks enables people to edit the meta date is pretty obvious-- they don't want people to use iBooks to read downloaded books, but only the books purchased from iBooks Store.
Edit metadata with Calibre for Mac
Although editing metadata with iBooks is impossible, it doesn't mean this is the end of the story. With another software, Calibre for Mac, we can edit book's metadata then load the book into iBooks for Mac app.
First we import the book into Calibre.
From the image above we can see that the cover of the book A DANCE WITH DRAGONS is missing, which is a pretty typical case where we need to edit the metadata to add cover.
Right click on the book title, choose 'Edit metadata', then 'Edit metadata individually'.
In this window we can customize almost all the important metadata. In this case I need to add a cover to the book, so I click 'Browse' in 'Change cover' area. If you want to make it simple, just directly click 'Download cover', and Calibre will search the cover from internet and add it for you.
After finding the cover image, click 'OK' to confirm. Then you can see the cover in Calibre now.
Jealous Author Mac Os Catalina
But job has not been finished yet, in fact the cover is only added in Calibre's library. To display the book's cover in iBooks for Mac, we need to add the cover image into the book file.
No matter that we are adding cover or modifying the names, converting the book to EPUB again is necessary. Only in this way, we can completely edit the metadata inside the book, not only in Calibre library.
So the last step is to convert the book to EPUB, even this file is already an EPUB file.
Load the modified book into iBooks for Mac
Find the converted file in Calibre's library and drag it into iBooks for Mac. Now we can see the book displayed in iBooks for Mac with the gorgeous cover.
Using the same method we can also add or modify other metadata like title, author & publisher, genre, etc. On Mac OS X Mavericks even the iBooks for Mac enable us to do so.
Jonny Greenwood joined Epubor since 2011, loves everything about eBooks and eReaders. He seeks the methods to read eBooks more freely and wants to share all he has got with you.
Jealous Author Mac OS