A virus on the OS9 machine?

[egor]

Well hello there,

Here's the situation, home network connected to net via linksys router, internal IP addresses allocated manually, external one is static. There's an iMac downstairs running OS9, apparently the cursor has been moving on its own opening menus etc. etc. as if someone had control over it... now, my thoughts are that someone didn't genuinly have control over it... I mean, if you'd found a vulnerability or to put it bluntly "hacked in" you wouldn't have control over the gui, yes? You'd maybe set up a trojan to act as a fileserver or something. So what I'm thinking is that maybe there is some sort of 'prank' virus on the machine? Does anyone have any idea of what could be wrong? I for one am stumped, the windows machine I'm on at the moment has a firewall (norton) and has had no attacks. Its very peculiar, someone using the mac machine is rather concerned, so any help is most appreciated.

 

[plastique45]

Well hello there,

Here's the situation, home network connected to net via linksys router, internal IP addresses allocated manually, external one is static. There's an iMac downstairs running OS9, apparently the cursor has been moving on its own opening menus etc. etc. as if someone had control over it... now, my thoughts are that someone didn't genuinly have control over it... I mean, if you'd found a vulnerability or to put it bluntly "hacked in" you wouldn't have control over the gui, yes? You'd maybe set up a trojan to act as a fileserver or something. So what I'm thinking is that maybe there is some sort of 'prank' virus on the machine? Does anyone have any idea of what could be wrong? I for one am stumped, the windows machine I'm on at the moment has a firewall (norton) and has had no attacks. Its very peculiar, someone using the mac machine is rather concerned, so any help is most appreciated.

1- OS 9 did have a few viruses and no built-in Firewall (you should get one)

2- What you describe appears to be a remote access. Do you have Apple Remote Desktop installed on that iMac?

 

[yellow]

Or Timbuktu, or VNC?

 

[dotdotdot]

Apple OS 9 has viruses - not nearly as many as Windows, but the "Virus Free, Safest OS in the world" began with OS X, its rock solid Unix foundation, combined with PowerPC hardware and good coding.

In Windows, this has happened to me once. I discovered the mouse input was messed up... that is the hopeful answer.

It could be remote access to the machine. It could be a trojan. I doubt its a hacker, as the hacker can take stuff from the machine and ultimatly take control over it, but the GUI and almost everything you see the hacker can't control...

 

[diamond geezer]

there is no virus in OS 9 that lets you take control of another computer

 

[egor]

2- What you describe appears to be a remote access. Do you have Apple Remote Desktop installed on that iMac?

Thats the other possibility that occured to me, I've never used apple remote desktop, it may be installed on it, I haven't used the OS in years though, I guess I'll have to figure out how to find out if its installed, any pointers as to what I should do would be most appreciated.

Will try and get a firewall/antivirus for it too.

Thanks for the help everyone, and confirming my thoughts that it couldn't be a hacker... or a virus...