Mac Attack Makes Aussie Number 4
- Botnet infects over 40,000 Aussie Macs
- Go to www.flashbackcheck.com to see if Mac infected
- Number of infections decreasing
The world’s largest Mac-based infection, the Flashfake botnet, has infiltrated 41,600 Australian computers, placing Aussie computers as the number four most infected by the virus in the world, according to security software specialist Kaspersky.
Kaspersky Lab’s experts recently analysed the Flashfake botnetand found a total of 670,000 infected computers worldwide, with more than 98 per cent of the affected computers most likely running the Mac operating system X.
“This is the largest Mac-based infection to date, with the largest number of victims coming from developed countries.” Nigel Hedges, Technical Services Manager, Kaspersky Australia and New Zealand said. “Flashfake emphasisesthe need for software to be regularly updated while at the same time destroying the popular myth that the Mac OS X is invulnerable to malware.”
An analysis of country of origin found that The United States had the most infected computers (300,917) followed by Canada (94,625), the United Kingdom (47,109) and Australia (41.600).
Kaspersky advises that consumers running Mac OS X visit www.flashbackcheck.com,a safe website, to check to see if their computer is infected. Users need to enter their Universally Unique Identifier (UUID), which will be checked against Kaspersky Lab’s Flashfake database of infected computers.
Kaspersky Lab experts have seen a decline in the number of active bots for Flashfake. On 6 April the total number was 650,748 and by 8 April the number of active bots had decreased to 237,103.
However, the decrease in infected bots does not mean the botnet is rapidly shrinking. The statistics represent the number of active bots connected to Flashfake during the past few days – it is not the equivalent of the exact number of infected machines. Infected computers that were inactive during the weekend would not be communicating with Flashfake, thus making them not appear as an infected bot.
