If you’re a user of the popular Mac torrent client Transmission, you need to read this. A warning popped up on the Transmission site over the weekend that should get your attention:
Everyone running 2.90 on OS X should immediately upgrade to 2.91 or delete their copy of 2.90, as they may have downloaded a malware-infected file.
Using “Activity Monitor” preinstalled in OS X, check whether any process named “kernel_service” is running. If so, double check the process, choose the “Open Files and Ports” and check whether there is a file name like “/Users//Library/kernel_service”. If so, the process is KeRanger’s main process. We suggest terminating it with “Quit -> Force Quit.
Lovely. Reuters reports that the infected download contained the first “Ransomware” found on the Mac platform. If you have version 2.90, you need to immediately update to version 2.92 which will remove the malware in question. But we may start seeing reports of hard drives being encrypted by this malware as early as today. Thus this story isn’t over by any means.