A Week After Apple's Fix, Flashback Still Infects Half a Million Macs

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "Security firm Dr. Web released new statistics Friday showing that the process of eliminating Flashback from Macs is proceeding far slower than expected: On Friday the security firm, which first spotted the Mac botnet earlier this month, released new data showing that 610,000 active infected machines were counted Wednesday and 566,000 were counted Thursday. That's a slim decrease from the peak of 650,000 to 700,000 machines infected with the malware when Apple released its cleanup tool for the trojan late last week. Earlier in the week, Symantec reported that only 140,000 machines remained infected, but admitted Friday that an error in its measurement caused it to underestimate the remaining infections, and it now agrees with Dr. Web's much more pessimistic numbers."

Comments

Re:Apple didn't issue fix 10.5, 16.5% of it's user

[Billly Gates]

I have more sympathy for those who blew $2,000 for an iMac only to be dumped in 3 years vs those in 2009 got a $199 netbook special with XP. 4 to 5 years support for these low end users sounds reasonable. Apple dropped them like a hot potato. Jobs even broke his own promise of supporting powerPC users for 5 more years.

So many corporate users and those who took our advice not to use Vista, and that XP was GOD wont leave. It is like XP became the pinnacle and gold standard in cannon on what the PC is for these people.

Of course it would help if companies like Cisco actually supported newer browsers besides IE 6 and 7. It forces these companies in. 20 million by 2014 will still be on XP or more vs just 500k with old macs will be a big challenge and will get nasty. I think this is a taste of what is to come.

If I were an evil credit card hacker I would write the ultimate new code red and wait until 1 day after MS ends all support and then have a field day getting rich. MS wont do anything about it until I have a few billion in stolen money. Like a license, unsupported machines should not be on the world wide web and need to be disabled. XP users will come out with pitchforks and flaming torches with an army of lawyers sadly.