Apple under attack: Flashback gives the flashbacks to sloppy security management from the company – Part 1

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Apple, Inc. made the news last week when it all came down to the Mac OS X platform that it has been vulnerable to malware threats for the last few months, going back to the last quarter of calendar 2011. The malware that has sprung the news is Flashback that first disguised itself as an Adobe Flash Player installer but recently became more dangerous with independent infiltration to the Mac OS X products.

“It’s the biggest, by far,” Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at antivirus and computer security firm F-Secure, told the media. “I’m afraid the malware-free times of Mac users are behind us permanently.”

Around 600,000 machines around the world running on Mac have been affected that is almost 98 percent of all the infected computers. That number, which came from Russian antivirus company Dr. Web earlier this week, was confirmed by security firm Kaspersky. More than 98 percent of the affected computers were running Mac OS X, the firm said.

Separately, Catalin Cosoi, chief security researcher for antivirus-software maker Bitdefender, said the infection was likely the largest for the Mac so far this decade, but that there’s no precise way to measure how many Mac OS computers have been compromised.

“600,000 represents around 12 percent of the Mac OS computers sold in Q4 2011,” Cosoi said, “which means that if we count the number of Mac OS devices sold in the past three years, we can estimate that less than 1 percent of the Mac OS computers are possibly infected. On the other hand, if we look at the actual numbers and not at the percentages, the numbers look pretty scary.”

Is it impossible to migrate from iOS to other platforms? – Part 1

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Posted by Usman Khalid on Apr 9 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.