600,000 Macs Worldwide Reportedly Infected by Flashback Trojan
Ars Technica reports on a Tweet from Russian malware analyst Ivan Sorokin at Dr. Web claiming that the Flashback trojan has now infected over 600,000 Macs worldwide. That number reportedly includes 274 machines "from Cupertino", presumably meaning at Apple's headquarters.
According to Dr. Web, the 57 percent of the infected Macs are located in the US and 20 percent are in Canada. Like older versions of the malware, the latest Flashback variant searches an infected Mac for a number of antivirus applications before generating a list of botnet control servers and beginning the process of checking in with them.
The authors of the Flashback trojan have continued to tweak the software since it first surfaced last September, adjusting its tactics several times to include both social engineering tricks and exploits of vulnerabilities.
The most recently-seen version of Flashback surfaced earlier this week, exploiting a Java vulnerability that was unpatched on OS X. While Oracle had released an update closing the hole on Windows back in February, Apple had yet to issue a fix for Macs, as the company has historically maintained its own Java updates that are deployed some time after Oracle issues its own corresponding updates. But just a day after that report, Apple did update Java to address the vulnerability being exploited by Flashback.
Antivirus firm F-Secure has instructions on how users can determine whether their machines are infected by the Flashback trojan. The instructions do involve running commands in Terminal, and users should thus take care to follow the instructions exactly.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Top Rated Comments
The malware self-installs after you visit a compromised or malicious webpage. Obviously, it would be a good idea to update any Macs in your control.
For those who want to check if mac is infected (from F-Secure instructions):
Run the following command in terminal:
defaults read /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment
defaults read ~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES
If you get "The domain/default pair ... does not exist" for both - you are clean
from 9to5mac
Humans can't get malware.
In Windows, you just need to use Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool or a decent anti-virus, which involves 1 or 2 clicks.
Yea, it's gotta be very hard to click things. I mean, typing commands in Terminal must be simpler.
I know that MacRumors is an Apple oriented place, where Apple lovers come to discuss things about Apple's product. But, posts like the one I quoted make it look like a fanboy place, not an Apple technology discussion place.