Flashback Botnet

I made a brief reference to Brian Krebs’ article on Apple’s belated Java update, in an update to my own blog from earlier today. However, I feel I should revisit it briefly in a separate blog to make sure you catch not only the excellent Krebs article, but also one of the points he made in it, deriving from a blog by Russian AV vendor DrWeb that indicates just how belated Apple’s update was.

The company did some research to estimate the spread of the Flashback botnet, and estimates that as of April 4th, it includes 550,000 machines running OS X. I’ve no doubt that at least 550,000 Mac zealots will now go into denial and mutter darkly about Mac haters, but it does seem that DrWeb has earned the right to read the last rites over the myth of OS X’s invulnerability to malware, if anyone still believes it.

File under Schadenfreude, if you like, but don’t ignore it. This is major, unfortunately for those of us who actually like Macs.

David Harley CITP FBCS CISSP