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What is abmst (A Bit More Secure Terminal)?

UGSoft has released the virus protection tool 'abmst' (A Bit More Secure Terminal) for all Mac OS X versions free-of-charge.

abmst prevents unintended execution of Terminal documents (e.g. viruses masked as normal documents, which want to execute terminal sessions) until this security issue is solved in Mac OS X itself.

The abmst installer installs two files, the shell scripts abmst-en and abmst-de in /usr/local/bin/ - an english and a german version. One of them must be entered in the Terminal application's preferences dialog instead of the usual shells. From then on a confirmation is requested whether to start a command or not which is eventually passed to the Terminal application whenever a Terminal window would be opened. Alternatively a normal shell can be executed.

Advantage compared to other protection mechanisms:
- no need to rename or move the Terminal application to another folder.
- protects even if a document (with a masked virus) is opened from the Finder.

abmst can be downloaded locally from UGSoft.

How to install and activate abmst?

- install abmst using the installer abmst.pkg
- after installation is finished start the Terminal application from /Applications/Utilities/
- in the Terminal application open the Terminal/Preferences... menu item
- select the 'Execute this command' radio button
- enter the path '/usr/local/bin/abmst-en' followed by one of the following shell commands which will be executed in case no Terminal document was passed to the Terminal application eg:
/usr/bin/login
/bin/tcsh
/bin/bash

A valid entry will look like eg: /usr/local/bin/abmst-en /usr/bin/login

Testing installation and activation

Open a new window in the Terminal application. An abmst message is displayed.

February 2006, www.ugsoft.de

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