Uyghur Power Mac users: watch out

If you're in China's less well-behaved territories and you use a Power Mac, looks like the People's Glorious Malware Factory No. 1 has something for you too. Jokes aside, Kaspersky is reporting a Universal version of the MaControl trojan attached to E-mails apparently trying to spearphish Uyghur Mac users. Trojans aren't really anything new to our world, of course; there are a number of older trojans which will successfully run on and attack Power Macs, very few of which remain in the wild. MaControl, however, is an advanced persistent threat-type infection that has a long history of use by Chinese hacker-enforcers, and to my knowledge this is the first time that it has been made "available" to Power Mac users, meaning at least someone out there still remembers us in our little RISC foxhole. It may also be a recognition that in those far-flung regions older non-Intel Macs are probably still seeing significant usage, the Dalai Lama's karma-depleting use of inferior Intel technology notwithstanding. So be careful about strange E-mails bearing strange .apps.

For folks new to this blog, read previous comments on Power Mac Internet security here, specifically discussing OS X and built-in apps, and a little bit more here.

I am working on the Fx15 port a bit early, which is being bogged down by the MPL license change invalidating many of our patches and DOM event changes requiring some big surgery to widget/. More on that later. However, we are still on schedule for an Fx14/10.0.6 release around July 13, and Classilla users will also be happy to hear that several major security flaws have been eradicated from 9.3.1 so far; the audit is now almost to the Mozilla 1.8 era and the review process should get faster then as many of the flaws will start to cover code that doesn't exist in Classilla.

As far as Firefox itself goes, no decision has been reached so far about 10.5 support. You'll be the first to know.

BTW: 100th post!