Flashback Botnet
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
The computer security industry is buzzing with warnings that more than half a million Macintosh computers may have been infected with a virus targeting Apple machines.
Dr. Web originally reported Wednesday that 550,000 Macintosh computers were infected by the growing Mac botnet. But later in the day, Dr. Web malware analyst Sorokin Ivan announced on Twitter that the number of Macs infected with Flashback had increased to 600,000, with 274 of those based in Cupertino, Calif.
Dr. Web explained that a system gets infected with the Mac Flashback trojan "after a user is redirected to a bogus site from a compromised resource or via a traffic distribution system." A specific JavaScript code on the site that contains the virus is then used to load a Java applet, which is how the malware makes its way onto a user's computer.
This Trojan spreads via infected web pages and exploits Java vulnerabilities that have been known for some time, yet Apple didn’t see fit to release a patch until this week (Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 7 and Java for OS X Lion 2012-001). Keep reading
Removal Tool
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