How to defend against Flashback malware, which hit 600K Macs
(Read article summary)A Trojan called Flashback is on the loose. The target: Apple Mac laptops and desktops. Good thing Apple released two defensive patches.
Apple users are accustomed to thinking of their Macs as malware-resistant, if not completely virus-proof.
Which is what makes the news of the Flashback Trojan so frightening: Here's a piece of malware which has infected a reported 600,000 Mac machines around the globe, creating in the process a sprawling botnet army that stretches across at least a dozen countries, including the US, Canada, Japan, and Australia.
According to the Russian tech site Dr. Web, which has extensively studied the Flashback Trojan, approximately 56 percent of the affected machines are in the US. Computers become infected "after a user is redirected to a bogus site from a compromised resource or via a traffic distribution system," the team at Dr. Web wrote yesterday. "JavaScript code is used to load a Java-applet containing an exploit."
