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Flashback Trojan, a Menace to Worldwide Macs

According to the anti-virus firm based in Russia, Dr. Web, different Flashback variants are residing on numerous Mac computers, spreading infection all over the world. The firm, on April 4, 2012, declared in Russian and then in English the manner in which the Trojan's infection was expanding a Mac botnet, initially containing 550,000 contaminated Macs.

However, Sorokin Ivan a malware analyst from Dr. Web said on the same date how gradually the number of contaminated Macs increased to 600,000. Of these, Apple's headquarters situated in Cupertino, CA checked in 274 bots. 9to5mac.com published this on April 4, 2012.

Dr. Web, which compiled certain statistics, declared that the majority of the contaminations originated in USA, which had 303,449 or 56.6% contaminated PCs, with Canada following at 106,379 or 19.8%, then UK with 68,577 or 12.8% contaminated hosts and finally Australia accounting for 32,527 or 6.1% infected units.

Remarking about these developments, Ivan stated that hitherto, he hadn't come across any other revelation on the number of Flashback-infected computers. Nonetheless, incase the precise number was calculated, the huge Mac infections known so far might distort what was ordinarily perceived about OS X being free of viruses, while purchases of the Mac anti-virus (AV) programs could significantly increase. Moreover, considering that any agency revealing the numbers was also therefore a seller of AV applications, Ivan thought it was important to have such an agency's claim substantiated prior to becoming excessively excited. Averysawaba.blogspot.com.au published this on April 4, 2012.

Meanwhile according to Dr. Web, since 2011, its researchers have been monitoring and reporting about Trojan Flashback, though found the latest strain of the malware exploiting an un-patched security flaw in Java running on Mac OS X, a couple of days back. However, Oracle had developed one patch that addresses it, during February 2012, yet Apple waited till April 2012 first week to release it only when news started unfolding regarding the most recent Flashback strain.

Conclusively, Dr. Web suggests that Mac computers can remain safeguarded from the Flashback, if users of Mac OS X take down and load Apple's security update at the earliest.

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