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

semantics of the term "Trojan"

[Anonymous Coward]

According to wikipedia, Flashback uses web redirects and javascript to automatically load a Java applet that contains the vulnerability.

In my book, it's only a Trojan if a real person is duped into executing it, and IMHO an infected legitimate website redirecting someone to a malicious website that automatically runs something that infects the user's computer does not count as duping a person into executing something.

TL;DR: Flashback is not a trojan. We need a new term for this type of threat.

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

[Billly Gates]

10.5 makes up 16.5% of Mac users, sure a lot are on PPC and the Flashback isn't targeting it, or is it?

Also about 4-5% are still on 10.4%

Apple didn't issue Diginotar Root certs fixes for these older OS X version neither.

Come when 10.8 is released, a whopping 65% of Mac users on 10.4-10.6 will be ripe for the pickings

Because Apple only updates the last two OS X versions in circulation, then is now releasing a new OS X version every year.

Microsoft on the other hand issues updates for their OS for 10 years?

Mac's a better value? Less prone to malware? Not for too much longer...

... and yet I find it hilarious when I read all the angry rants on wired.com and here on how poor old XP is going to lose support in 2 years a mere 13.5 years after launch.

This dwells into the more serious issue of the security nightmare that will come when all internet enabled computers that are more used like XP become abandonded. Personally I think it would be a good idea to disable port 80 on all devices 3 months after support ends to keep the upcoming security nightmare. It will anger many users but many malware writters will target XP if MacOSX has so many infections yet remains so small marketshare wise still. We do not allow vehicles with rags for a gas cap to go on the road right?

I understand Apple losses money to support users but something should be done. If not after a few billion lost dollars in bank accounts will create some nasty lawsuits.