Virus-free glory days for Mac owners soon to be over?

We know our pretty little Macs aren’t THAT good – they don’t actually repel computer viruses. It’s just that until now the Mac market has been too small for most malware programmers to pay much notice, choosing instead to throw their appetites for destruction at the PC market.

This could now all be set to change, as hardworking hackers have managed to write at least one cross-platform virus, according to McAfee. TechEye says the trinket is called IncognitoRAT, and it’s a Java-based Trojan virus. It has a programme which converts .jar files into .exe files, which means the intruder can control the keyboard and mouse of the computer, record images seen through the webcam and send information out on email.

Bad enough, but the real issue is that if hackers can write a virus to attach Macs in the same swoop as PCs, this could mean Mac-owners need to create a new budget post: anti-virus software. It’s a sad day for smug Mac people everywhere.