Macintosh problem by: Gene Spafford The Problem: We have received an unconfirmed report of a nasty trojan horse Hypercard stack for Macintosh computers, or else a very buggy regular stack. The stack is named "Hermes Optimizer 1.1" and was allegedly distributed through the Olympus BBS, although by now it may have gone farther. According to the report, the "About" message shows the author as 70142,210 (CompuServe) and FARRADAY1 (AppleLink). It claims to reduce fragmentation in Hermes Shared files. However, according to the report, it actually renames all the files on the hard disk, then deletes them. This may be the a buggy program. It may be a malicious program. In either case, the Mac community has not yet had a chance to analyze a copy. What to do: Warn your users not to run this stack if they find it. If they do find it, have them provide you with a copy to either analyze and/or send on to me to have analyzed. Please do *not* call this a virus. It would also be unfair at this juncture to label it as malicious, either -- we have not yet analyzed it. At this point, it might be best to say that it has potentially damaging bugs (or similar). Thanks. --gene spafford