There's one thing to be said for living your computing life as a constant battle against infection by viruses, worms, spyware, and other nasties: not much fazes you anymore. Inform a Windows user that there's a new virus on the loose that will delete all of his files, email his credit card data to the Russian mob, slash the tires on his car, and then loot and pillage his hometown leaving it nothing but a smoldering, blackened husk and he'll probably say, "and this changes my life from three minutes ago how, exactly?" Because those guys are under attack all the freakin' time, so most of them are so jaded about virus attacks that they'd consider swimming ten laps in a pool of Ebola soup to be, at worst, "mildly offputting."

In contrast, tell a Mac user that a Mac OS X-native virus has finally been spotted in the wild that lowers an infected Mac's volume setting by two notches, and he or she may well burst into flame and plunge screaming through the nearest plate glass window because the apocalypse is upon us and may a higher power take pity upon the wretched, twisted wreck that will soon be our lives.

Well, if you're the nervous type, prepare for flaming defenestration, because faithful viewer manu chao (and if one of you guys went all the way to Switzerland to swipe his AtAT t-shirt from his mailbox, that was seriously uncool) tipped us off to a MacInTouch report that begins with a reader's assertion that "there's now a real virus out there for Mac OS X that can do some real damage." Merely dubbed "Opener" for now, this puppy may well be the hardest working virus in show business: it records keystrokes, installs and enables hidden VNC and Timbuktu servers to enable remote access, steals your registration numbers from a whole slew of applications, grabs a ton of personal stuff like your instant messaging logs and software preferences, installs and runs a password-cracking app to try to decrypt your Mac OS X account passwords, and more more more.

There's just one thing, though: it's not actually a virus at all, or a worm, or even really a trojan for that matter. You may notice that, among its many impressive tasks, we didn't list anything like "emails itself to everyone in Address Book" or "infects all network-shared files in the Public folder" or anything else than might lead it to spread. In fact, the comments in the script itself make it clear that "to install this script you need admin access or physical access" or "write access" to various directories that are admin-only by default, or you'd have to "trick someone who has an admin account into installing it." So, okay, sure, it may be "malware" that does a whole lot of nasty stuff similar to what real Windows viruses and worms like to do, but at least as of yet, it doesn't self-propagate and an admin user has to manually install it before it can do anything in the first place. Honestly, you could tell an admin user that he can triple the speed of his Mac by typing "sudo rm -r /*" in a Terminal window (don't do that, by the way), and that's pretty much a "virus" to the same degree that this "Opener" script thing is.

That doesn't mean it couldn't be turned into a virus, we suppose, or more likely, a slick trojan. But for now, at least, you can postpone the whole flaming-leap-through-plate-glass routine, because this thing is essentially just a bunch of stuff you most definitely don't want to install on your Mac unless you want the full-on Windows experience. Well, okay, for the real full-on Windows experience you'd also have to strap on a pair of Ugly-Ray Spex and resign yourself to a life of bitter frustration and despair, but at least it'll cover the Total Lack of Security side of things. Enjoy!