More than 600,000 Macs infected with Flashback botnet

Doctor Web analyzes objects downloaded by BackDoor.Flashback onto infected Macs

April 27, 2012

Doctor Web virus analysts continue to study the first-ever large-scale botnet created by means of BackDoor.Flashback and comprised of computers running Mac OS X. Files downloaded by the Trojan horse from servers controlled by criminals have become one of the main subjects for analysis.


http://news.drweb.com/show/?i=2410&lng=en&c=5

 

OSX is most vulnerable to attacks against exploits in Java, Flash and MS Office for Mac. The latest OSX updates by Apple that only allow that the latest version is installed before it can run on OSX is a step in the right direction. After many years of seeing people's MS Windows based systems (friends, family, etc.) get repeatedly infected through Java and Java browser plug-in exploits I finally took action and removed ALL new and old installations of Java from most of my Windows based systems this past month. I also have Java disabled on my OSX system. I don't use MS Office for OSX. I have the latest version of Flash installed on all my systems with restricted permissions set.

These vulnerabilities have been repeating over and over for a very long time and there never seems to be an end in sight to them. Something has to be finally done to put an end to the Java, Flash and MS Office based exploits. Apple has taken a step in the right direction. Hopefully other OS, software and browser developers will follow with similar security updates.