Mac Flashback Attack Began With Wordpress Blogs

With more on the Flashback malware plaguing many Macs, beaverdownunder writes with some explanation of how the infection grew so quickly: "Alexander Gostev, head of the global research and analysis team at Kaspersky, says that 'tens of thousands of sites powered by WordPress were compromised. How this happened is unclear. The main theories are that bloggers were using a vulnerable version of WordPress or they had installed the ToolsPack plug-in.'"

Comments

Walled Garden

[DrYak]

Obviously Flashback had the benefit of fighting against a userbase largely ignorant of security and it's quite likely that if Apple and it's users start taking security seriously, future Mac infections will have significantly less impact. But history tells me things will become much worse before it gets better.

Or, not.

For this you'll need Apple to back pedal on some simplification they've made to make their OS more accessible to less technical people. (Like installing application simply by drag-droping an icon from an archive into a system folder. With no privilege asked).

I think that they'll rather use this incident as a golden pretext to put consummer OS X laptops into a iOS-like walled garden. If users only install Apple approved Apps on the laptops, the risks of infection should be dropping, right?~ And who needs non approved apps expect some developpers and other similarly crazy people.