Doctor Web disputes “significant decrease” in Mac Flashback Malware

Some industry leaders are now claiming that the Backdoor.Flashback.39 bot number has been significantly decreased but the researchers at Doctor Web dispute this.

Who to believe?

“According to Doctor Web, 817 879 bots connected to the BackDoor.Flashback.39 botnet at one time or another and average 550 000 infected machines interact with a control server on a 24 hour basis. On April 16, 717004 unique IP-addresses and 595816 Mac UUIDs were registered on the BackDoor.Flashback.39 botnet while on April 17 the figures were 714 483 unique IPs and 582405 UUIDs. At the same time infected computers, that have not been registered on the BackDoor.Flashback.39 network before, join the botnet every day. The chart below shows how the number of bots on the BackDoor.Flashback.39 botnet has been changing from April 3 to April 19, 2012.”



(Image courtesy of Doctor Web)

Those of us geeks can see why this makes sense. I have heard from so many people that they were considering a Mac for their next computer because they don’t get viruses. I have explained to them that it is simply a numbers game. Macintosh has on average 5% of the market and PC has the rest. Most Mac users tend to be savvy and use the internet safer than the average PC user. There isn’t a lot of money to be made chasing around 5% of the market share. My assumption would be that a lot of these infected computers belong to people who bought a “virus safe” Macintosh in the last couple of years.

Whether you are a PC user or a Mac user, one rule always applies. Update your computer when asked. Vulnerabilities are always a big factor when you use Adobe Flash, Javas and other internet based programs. It’s not the computer; it’s the user that determines how safe you are.

Doctor Web once gain warns Mac OS X users of the BackDoor.Flashback.39 threat and strongly recommends you to install Java updates and scan the system to determine whether it has been infected. For more information about BackDoor.Flashback detection and neutralization visit https://www.drweb.com/flashback/. To remove the Trojan, you can use Dr.Web for Mac OS X Light available free of charge.