Doctor Web exposes 550,000 strong Mac botnet

Doctor Web—the Russian anti-virus vendor—conducted a research to determine the scale of spreading of Trojan BackDoor.Flashback that infects computers running Mac OS X. Now BackDoor.Flashback botnet encompasses more than 550 000 infected machines, most of which are located in the United States and Canada. This once again refutes claims by some experts that there are no cyber-threats to Mac OS X.

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A Guy

And I thought Macs were so secure they need no security software.:shock:

This will wake up mac users in denial.

M1GU31 said:

This will wake up mac users in denial.

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No, it won't.

It "ought" to. But it won't...

I know a Mac worshiper, and he'd pick it apart by telling us it's not a true infection because it requires the user to click on something, etc. Blah, blah, blah. In his mind, it's still not an issue. I think 500,000 other OSX users would disagree. A Guy

MAC users will say that even if 1 or 2 things come along once in awhile, it's not like Windows where we have hundreds, thousands and millions of problems every single day.

Britton30 said:

And I thought Macs were so secure they need no security software.:shock:

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That's what I thought, also.
It just goes to show that no OS is impervious.

How secure are the Chomebooks then? I don't know of any AV's that run on that thing if it's even possible.

profdlp said:

M1GU31 said:

This will wake up mac users in denial.

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No, it won't.

It "ought" to. But it won't...

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So true. Mac users make me angry

Watch this Mac OSX user get hit by BackDoor.Flashback: icnic:

:roflmao:

Both Windows and MAC OS are operating systems that have exploitable bugs. Because the hackers focused more on Windows and less to none on MAC OS due to various reasons doesn't mean that the MAC operating system is invincible.

Any piece of software can be exploitable if enough people focus on trying to exploit it.

PwnFrnzy said:

How secure are the Chomebooks then? I don't know of any AV's that run on that thing if it's even possible.

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I believe Chromebook is much more secure than most desktop OSes for a couple of reasons:
1) It only runs code in the browser (no native code) and the browser is sandboxed so it's extremely hard for bad guys to design an exploit that will infect the OS.
2) During the boot process, Chrome OS checks every single OS component agains the list of checksums. If checksums differ for a given component, that component is simply discarded and a new one is downloaded on the fly from Google. So even if malware finds its way into the OS, it will simply be discarded during the next boot because it won't match any checksums.

so how did this spread? The App Store?

Flashback the largest Mac malware threat yet, experts say

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past week, you've probably heard about Flashback, a piece of malware targeting users of Apple's Mac OS X that's now estimated to be quietly running on more than 600,000 machines around the world.

That number, which came from Russian antivirus company Dr. Web earlier this week, was confirmed today by security firm Kaspersky. More than 98 percent of the affected computers were running Mac OS X, the firm said.

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Source

A Guy

Everyone makes fun of Microsoft and their "Patch Tuesdays", pointing out how many vulnerabilities there seem to be in Windows. Yet this was patched by them months ago.

Pride goeth before a fall. I guess Apple's smuggery came back to bite them.

Looks like OSX has gone from "Mountain Lion" to Kitty Cat.

As a Mac user I've always said the same thing to OSX users as I do Windows users... to make sure to practice and learn better computing and always look into the best methods of protecting yourself and others.

The response I always get on Macrumors.com is how "there's no virus in the wild for Macs" or "a trojan is not a virus" and what not. While technically true, I still argue that people shouldn't merely rely on how they're a small target/demographic or because of how "OSX is based on Unix" argument. I myself use ClamXAV 2 from time to time and I scan all external data devices before they're mounted on my Mac. Even that isn't a foolproof solution, nothing is, but it lowers my risk levels than someone who doesn't use anything merely relies on browser sandboxing and OS level protection.

I countered the argument (to no avail) about how a trojan does fall under the category of malware and OSX does have a hidden Xprotect antimalware engine by Apple and obviously it wasn't enough. Being an equal Windows PC user I stated how PC users have already learned that relying on OS technology alone to protect your machine isn't enough and a responsible user always incorporates multiple layers of protection.