DEV

Q: Have you ever been tempted to look into a computer virus, but were too afraid to proceed in fear of an uncontrolled infection?

A: We did. And this is what we found. Not a Virus. A Rat.

Sensitive reader Advisory:
This article goes into the details of a server-side RAT infestation, and will end by aforementioned RAT dissection. At the end, you will even be given the opportunity to TRY THE RAT yourself! (in the confined safety of our lab, of course)
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The MacOS X Dashboard can be invoked by a single keystroke, or launched from the Dock.

While the Dashboard is a handy utility, reminiscent of Apple Desk Accessories and strongly inspired from Konfabulator, you can’t quit the darn thing. Until now(*).

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Q: ”I installed the Apple Security Update that was made available today. Now, I have constant high CPU from a process called ‘MRT’.”

Short Answer: Use MRT Removal Tool. Problem solved.

Long Answer:  Mac OS X version 10.6.7, together with Security Update 2011-003 or Mac OS X version 10.6.8 come with a new crawling software named Malware Removal Tool, MRT for short. On some computers, MRT consumes a staggering amount of resources, causing the the machine to become unresponsive, the battery to drain, the computer to overheat, and pretty much come to a halt. This apparently affects the MacBook Pro particularly badly.

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Referencing and de-referencing objects in an Object Oriented Environment can be a challenge.These are real life examples; the names of the objects have been changed to preserve the identity of the victims. Please fasten your seat belt.

When I take an airplane, I cannot help but think of all the poor programming practices I have witnessed -some committed by myself- over the years. I often wonder if the on-board computers have been programmed by my earlier engineering peers.
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Using the 1 Mb NSDateFormatter memory leak as a case-study, this tutorial shows how to locate and isolate unexpected memory allocation using Instruments. Technically, this 1 Mb loss is arguably not a leak, since the data is cached, and is still actively referenced by the system. Yet…

Instruments has built-in tools to isolate true leaks (lost blocks) but can also be used to locate memory loss. While this session references iPhone OS 3.1.3, it can be generalized: only the example is specific, not the concept.

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This is a follow-up to a post on stackoverflow.com, where it appears that 1 MB is lost after invoking NSFormatter -dateFromString.

I ran into the same situation, with very similar leak sizes to the ones reported on that article. Instruments shows that 868 Kb (889520 bytes to be exact) are allocated by Cocoa on iPhone OS (verified from 2.x to 3.x up to 3.1.3).
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When developing in Cocoa for Mac OS X or for iPhone, it is easy to overlook objects that are dropped in the current NSAutoreleasePool, ultimately leading to a crash. The following article applies to the use of NSAutoreleasePool when garbage collection is not enabled.

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Mission Statement:
Post software development insights as I come across them.