MPlayer - malware?

[Ian McCall]

One of the kids fell victim to a fake Flash Player installer earlier,
so I am in the process of wiping the Mac and reinstalling. Before I did
that, to mitigate anything happening whilst I was downloading the
Sierra installer, I installed Malwarebytes and ran it. It picked up on
everything I expected it to (three junk programs installed), and that's
fine.

Curious, I ran it against my iMac. It reported two pieces, both
belonging to one app - MPlayerX. Was a bit confused - mplayer as
malware? Then I searched and read this report:
<https://blog.malwarebytes.com/puppum/2016/09/pup-friday-mplayerx/>

Hmm - doesn't look good. Will be deleting from my system - I used to
prefer it to VLC a while ago, but I haven't opened either in so long
that the point is essentially moot.


Cheers,
Ian

[Tosis]

I've been using MPlayer OSX Extended since switching to a MBP early
2015. It hasn't been updated in ages (version 15 released late 2013)
but as I recall doesn't include an installer (distributed as ZIP
archive) and certainly didn't include any of the indicated unwanted
content. Thoughts on that variant?

[Paul Sture]

On 2017-01-16, Tosis <tosis+n...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> On 2017-01-14 00:08:30 +0000, Ian McCall said:
>
>> One of the kids fell victim to a fake Flash Player installer earlier,
>> so I am in the process of wiping the Mac and reinstalling. Before I did
>> that, to mitigate anything happening whilst I was downloading the
>> Sierra installer, I installed Malwarebytes and ran it. It picked up on
>> everything I expected it to (three junk programs installed), and that's
>> fine.
>>
>> Curious, I ran it against my iMac. It reported two pieces, both
>> belonging to one app - MPlayerX. Was a bit confused - mplayer as
>> malware? Then I searched and read this report:
>> <https://blog.malwarebytes.com/puppum/2016/09/pup-friday-mplayerx/>
>>
>> Hmm - doesn't look good. Will be deleting from my system - I used to
>> prefer it to VLC a while ago, but I haven't opened either in so long
>> that the point is essentially moot.
>

> I've been using MPlayer OSX Extended since switching to a MBP early
> 2015. It hasn't been updated in ages (version 15 released late 2013)
> but as I recall doesn't include an installer (distributed as ZIP
> archive) and certainly didn't include any of the indicated unwanted
> content. Thoughts on that variant?

My immediate thought is that the installer might have come from cnet,
softpedia, or similar source[1] which repackages freely available
software with their own crap included.

[1]These folks are pretty successful in getting their links ahead of
the genuine source in search engines.

--
A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into
I/O-bound problems. ---Ken Batcher

[Chris Ridd]

On 16/01/2017 10:15, Paul Sture wrote:
> On 2017-01-16, Tosis <tosis+n...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> On 2017-01-14 00:08:30 +0000, Ian McCall said:
>>
>>> One of the kids fell victim to a fake Flash Player installer earlier,
>>> so I am in the process of wiping the Mac and reinstalling. Before I did
>>> that, to mitigate anything happening whilst I was downloading the
>>> Sierra installer, I installed Malwarebytes and ran it. It picked up on
>>> everything I expected it to (three junk programs installed), and that's
>>> fine.
>>>
>>> Curious, I ran it against my iMac. It reported two pieces, both
>>> belonging to one app - MPlayerX. Was a bit confused - mplayer as
>>> malware? Then I searched and read this report:
>>> <https://blog.malwarebytes.com/puppum/2016/09/pup-friday-mplayerx/>
>>>
>>> Hmm - doesn't look good. Will be deleting from my system - I used to
>>> prefer it to VLC a while ago, but I haven't opened either in so long
>>> that the point is essentially moot.
>>
>> I've been using MPlayer OSX Extended since switching to a MBP early
>> 2015. It hasn't been updated in ages (version 15 released late 2013)
>> but as I recall doesn't include an installer (distributed as ZIP
>> archive) and certainly didn't include any of the indicated unwanted
>> content. Thoughts on that variant?
>
> My immediate thought is that the installer might have come from cnet,
> softpedia, or similar source[1] which repackages freely available
> software with their own crap included.

That does seem possible. MPlayer or MplayerX (I don't remember which)
was on the app store too for a while, but development was quite
publically stopped and after security vulnerabilities were discovered in
the libraries I gave up and switched to VLC. Hideous interface and all.

--
Chris

[Richard Tobin]

In article <13jukd-...@news.chingola.ch>,

Paul Sture <nos...@sture.ch> wrote:

>My immediate thought is that the installer might have come from cnet,
>softpedia, or similar source[1] which repackages freely available
>software with their own crap included.
>
>[1]These folks are pretty successful in getting their links ahead of
>the genuine source in search engines.

No, the author made a blog post in which he announced that he was
going to "monetize" it through the installer:

http://blog.mplayerx.org/blog/2015/04/16/some-progress-on-mplayerx/

-- Richard

[Ian McCall]

Interesting. And there's more here:
<https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6241637?tstart=0>

(Add 'optimise' to the list of words devalued by standard computer
jargon, like 'critical', 'recommended', 'experience'...)


Cheers,
Ian
--
Check out Proto the album: <http://studioicm.com/proto/>