Let's put this in perspective. I don't care if this thing is not a virus, that it is a trojan horse, or whatever. What Apple is trying to accomplish, is to entice Windows users to switch if for no other reason that they don't have to struggle with malware of various kinds. The average Windows user is sick and tired of all kinds of unwanted crap and look to OS X as their salvation to getting back to work and not fetishing over stuff under the hood. They no more want to go into Terminal than they wanted to drop into DOS. People who just want to get some work done or enjoy iLife have no more interest in UNIX exotica than they would have in trying to fix a transmission problem on their new vehicle by themselves. You may quibble that some are irresponsible or lazy because they use the same password for admin as for e.g. their e-mail, but busy people don't want to remember a slew of passwords, don't always understand or like the keychain, etc. In fact, there is no warning to a new OS X user that they ought to use different passwords for different reasons, AFAIK. Macs are supposed to be easy to use, right?
My case may be instructive: I sold my 2 yr. old IBM after being fed up with security problems and bought a Mini. I transferred over a slew of data and just wanted to get on with my computing life, but evidently got something like this Opener messing with the new computer. I definitely didn't give any admin permissions for this thing to run, all I can figure is that in my rush to transfer over data via file sharing, is that I turned off the OS X firewall to get it done, and forgot to turn it back on after I finished, and someone got access to the machine. What happened to me was, gradually but relentlessly, all my custom preferences disappeared and preference files were overwritten or generated with creation dates that show the original ones had been somehow nuked. I have no idea how or why, but it got so bad I simply returned the new computer to the dealer. I was using Tiger 1.4.2, so I can only conclude that Apple isn't up to snuff on security updates.
Toyota wouldn't be able to sell cars if the owner had to do their own repairs on unreliable transmissions, they just want to use the thing. If the vaunted Mac can't do that for consumers, it will always sit at the 5% level of market share. Yes, this is really disturbing. I wish I had my Windows machine back (I'm writing on an OS 9 Mac, which except for ageing programs, is far superior from a user's perspective to the OS X machines, no malware, better user interface, more intuitive and integrated).
Bottom line, if Apple decided to adopt the BSD underpinnings, it is incumbent upon them to implement vigorous protection against any kind of intrusion; if they do not, the switch movement upon which they rely will die on the vine. BTW, Apple Tech support didn't have any solutions for my gradual preference loss problem. They are clueless. I guess I'll wait another year and look in on a new OS X machine if and when they sort this out, if they do. Thanks for alerting me to this problem.
End of rant.