CYBERSPACE — Regardless of real or imagined perceptions to the contrary, Macs are not impervious to malware attacks and Mac users are not impervious to the allure of internet pornography. Alas, when in combination, pleasure turns rapidly into pain. According to the security experts at Sophos, two new malware attacks against Mac systems have been identified; one a new version of the OS X Tored worm and one a Trojan crouching hidden tiger-like inside of a porn site.

ParetoLogic, an anti-virus and anti-spyware research and production company, warned the computer world on Tuesday that a porn site was downloading malware targeting both PC and Mac systems. The company reported in its blog that victims using Macs were being redirected to the pagemac.php page, where a tampered QuickTime.dmg file awaited.

On Thursday Sophos blogged that visitors to the trap site were being instructed to download an ActiveX component in order to view video content. In a classic case of malware bait and switch, the downloaded code was OSX/Jahlavc, a Trojan.

“As we’ve demonstrated before and as we’ll no doubt explain again,” Sophos security researcher Graham Cluley pointed out, “the Mac malware threat is real.”

As Cluley explained it, “Hackers are deliberately planting malicious code on Web sites and using social engineering tricks to fool you into installing it onto your computer.”