Flashback Detections for Macs Lessening, Reports Symantec

Symantec, which published freshly-compiled data, reports that the number of Macs infected with Trojan Flashback reduced from about 50% of 1m units to approximately 25% over the last few months.

Besides, on April 11, 2012, some 270,000 PCs were contaminated with Flashback that greatly fell from a huge 600,000 as of April 6, 2012, while also down from 380,000 as of April 10, 2012.

The decline could be attributed to the hype of the Trojan as also ready solutions that spread faster during the recent days in comparison with the way Trojan Flashback itself proliferated. Incidentally, Flashback is created for filching passwords and other personal information.

Meanwhile, Symantec also reveals that currently, U.K, Australia and North America still have the greatest number of infections from the Flashback. On No.1 is USA having approximately 47.3% detections, with Canada following at 13%, and United Kingdoms at 6.1%. More countries ranked on Symantec's list are Australia at 5.1%, France -3.2%, Italy -2.9%, Mexico -2.9%, Japan -1.9%, Spain -1.8% and Germany -1.6%.

Furthermore, Intego the security software vendor stated on April 5, 2012 that each-and-every server, which was distributing the Trojan appeared as disconnected from the Internet. The reason explained was that several security firms worked on disclosing about the malicious program along with the servers from which it got distributed. Nevertheless, the central C&C (command-and-control) systems continued to be running, hence those Mac computers, which were contaminated continued to be susceptible to data being deceptively captured or more, the company added. Technolog.msnbc.msn.com published this on April 11, 2012.

Additionally, according to security researchers during the 1st-week of April 2012, the Flashback menace proved severest hitherto to attack Apple's Mac OS X just like the case of the 'MacDefender FAKEAV' panic of 2011.

Nevertheless Apple, during the same week, issued one security patch, which remedies vulnerability in Java running on computers with active OS X versions 10.7 and 10.6. Previous versions continue to be susceptible while Apple recommends that users should deactivate Java for stopping potential attacks. Moreover, an update installation is also recommended incase it hasn't been done alternatively the update should be downloaded directly from Apple's website.

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» SPAMfighter News - 4/19/2012