600,000 Macs Worldwide Reportedly Infected by Flashback Trojan

[DJ aka GDR DJ]

Dr. Ivan Sorokin at web claiming that the trojan has now infected Flashback over 600 000 worldwide Macs. That number includes 274 machines reportedly "from Cupertino", presumably meaning at Apple's headquarters.

 

According to Dr. Web, the 57 percent of the infected Macs are located in the U.S. and 20 percent are in Canada. Like older versions of the malware, the latest variant Flashback searches on infected Mac for a number of antivirus applications before generating a list of botnet control servers and beginning the process of checking in with them.

 

The authors of the Flashback trojans have continued to tweak the software since it first surfaced, last September, adjusting its tactics several times to include both social engineering tricks and exploits of vulnerabilities.

The most recently-seen version of Flashback surfaced earlier this week, exploiting a vulnerability that was unpatched Java on OS X. While Oracle had released an update on Windows closing the hole back in January, Apple had yet to issue a fix for Macs, as the company has historically maintained its own Java updates that are deployed sometime after Oracle issues its own corresponding updates. But just a day after that report, Apple did update Java to address the vulnerability being exploited by Flashback.

Anti-virus firm F-Secure has instructions on how users can Determine whether their machines are infected by the trojan flashback. The instructions involve running Thurs commands in Terminal, and users should take care to Malthus follow the instructions exactly.

 

source

[TulsaGeoff]

WHAT??? But these are MACs! No one targets MACS...... LoL

[ajnl]

Son of a gun! lol That's why I've had an anti-virus app installed on my macbook since the first day I got it! lol

[Esteb@n24]

Bill Gates reaction:

[Chuckun]

Bill Gates reaction: #

 

I was genuinely about to reply with "HAH." - but this is so much better xD

 

I don't wish a trojan on anyones computer but the whole "Macs dont have viruses" b/s always annoyed the hell out of me. People spout bullshit they hear from companies wording things a certain way, know nothing about it, then the 'chinese-whisper' effect comes into play and suddenly 'there are no viruses!' - yes there are, they're just less common.

 

So for this reason, I'm glad this story is out.. Even if it is brought upon us by thousands of poor b*stards having their computer infected. >.<

[TulsaGeoff]

600,000 Apples? Thats about, if not than, $600,000,000 worth of computers!