I have an imac osx 5 mos.old. First time today I can not open my desktop folder/files. I need to read them. Message is: appleworks 6 quit unexpectedly. I need to read them. Is it possible that new software downloaded yesterday is problem?

Question

I have an imac osx 5 months old. For the first time today I can not open my desktop folders which are very important to me. How can I open these folders.
The message when I click on the folder is "appleworks 6 quit unexpectedly". I can not open the folder. Is it possible that new software installed could cause the problem when I get the message "new softward available for your computer, install now. Maybe I should never install upgrade. Please help in layman's language how to open my folders. Thanks.

Answer 1

X423424X wrote:
The curious thing here is that on the one hand the code cannot be loaded so how could the trojan code be ever executed.  But you would expect the "Unexpectedly quit" message if the intel trojan did get executed in a ppc app.  So this begs the question when (and how) does the trojan code get executed in conjunction with launching an app?
I understand code injected into a specific app like safari that uses the global environment variable to access the code in /Users/Shared.  But I don't understand how that code could be executed by attempting to run an randomly chosen ppc app.  Unless of course   other code has been injected is in a more critical place than just safari and that is scary.
Some of this was explained to us a few weeks back by an infected user who reverse engineered the code, working with Intego to figure out why he was being re-directed on Google searches. At the time, nobody believed much of anything he was saying, but F-Secure explains it more fullly in this analysis. Note that there is a filter component to keep it from loading code into apps that would be unstable, so watch for the next variant to filter out ppc only apps.
In a related matter, I got word from the PC side of the house that similar techniques are being used by drive-by infections that were injecting code into a running app which would disappear when they quit the app. A one-time infection, so to speak. Makes it really hard to even know you were temporarily infected, let alone how, why, what damage, etc.