Researchers Confirm Flashback Trojan Infects 600,000 Macs, Used For Click Fraud
By: Andy Greenberg, Forbes
For anyone who doubted that Apple’s long grace period with cybercriminals is over, doubt no more: On Friday, researchers at Russian antivirus firm Kaspersky confirmed findings from another security firm earlier this week that more than 600,000 computers running Mac’s OSX are infected with the Flashback botnet, and half of those machines are in the United States.
Kaspersky’s researchers reverse-engineered the Flashback malware and created a fake “command and control” server for collection of hijacked PCs, intercepting and analyzing their connections. As they’ve detailed in a blog post, they were able to map out the machines’ locations: 300,000 in the U.S., 95,000 in the Canada, 47,000 in the United Kingdom, and 42,000 in Australia, for instance.
