Flashback Infection of Macs Sharply Falls

Symantec and Kaspersky, each a security company reported that Mac computers, which contracted the Flashback Trojan, had dropped remarkably in number and stood at more than 600,000 PCs during the first two weeks of April 2012.

Although, unleashing a malware attack of the greatest intensity on the OS X, the Flashback reportedly infected over 600,000 Mac computers on April 9, 2012 when the Trojan was at its highest point of destruction. Additional research of the Trojan's activity that Kindsight, also a security company conducted, suggest that in USA, a maximum of only one household out of every 15 having Macs may've contracted this malicious program.

Symantec, which published an estimate of the Mac infection, on April 17, 2012, stated that it had declined and recorded a count of 140,000 systems. However, according to Kaspersky Labs, the estimated drop in Flashback's infection on Macs was even less around 30,000 machines.

Security firm Dr. Web asserts that the Macs, which became infected with Flashback, counts to over 650,000 while novel bypassing methods by the malware and the shortfalls within security agencies' methodologies are generating untrue data.

The period of early April this year (2012), the time of Flashback's first discovery, was for Dr. Web arranging to have the most popular domains that were utilized as the Trojan's command and control (C&C) servers, whereas in the instance of other security companies, they in all probability utilized 'compromised servers,' which aren't so reliable.

Symantec and Kaspersky elaborates that the technique with which Flashback operates facilitates the Trojan's botnet in remaining greatly outside the notice of the compromised Internet-connected systems that probably explains as to why, the decline was so steep (140,000-30,000).

In spite of this drop, it's largely evident from Flashback that malware attacks can still weaken Mac OS X.

Given that, an only reason for the Flashback to continue as being active is that the consumers of Mac aren't at all utilizing the available tools. While they may've knowledge of the malware's existence from breaking news stories, still inadvertently think that the problem will affect only other people's Mac computers and not their own.

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» SPAMfighter News - 4/30/2012