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Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
Apple has released another fix for Java that also is designed to remove several of the variants of the Flashback Trojan that have been plaguing Mac users for months now. The update, released on Thursday, is the latest in a series of attempts by the company to address the Flashback situation.
Researchers have known for a long time that many users don’t pay much attention to updating the third-party software, browser plugins and extensions, and that lack of care has been to the benefit of attackers for years. Attacks on Flash, Java, QuickTime and various other ubiquitous apps have been a major concern for Windows users for the better part of a decade, and now that same situation is presenting itself to Mac users.
HP is warning customers that some of its ProCurve switches were shipped recently with compact flash cards infected with malware. The company said that a number of software versions in the ProCurve 5400 switch were affected, and that PCs could be become infected by the malware under some conditions.
There is a serious remotely exploitable vulnerability in the Samba open-source software that could enable an attacker to gain root privileges without any authentication. The bug is in all versions of Samba from 3.0.x to 3.6.3, but has been fixed in Samba 3.6.4, which is the current stable release.
Apple is planning to release a software fix that will find and remove the Flashback malware that has been haunting Mac users for several months now. The latest version of Flashback has built a botnet that at times has included more than 600,000 infected machines.
Dennis Fisher talks with Ryan Naraine and Costin Raiu about the Flashback Mac botnet, why Apple is reluctant to let third parties update software on Macs and the future outlook for the security of Macs.
Mac malware is still enough of an oddity that the existence of a single botnet made up of Macs has prompted a huge amount of publicity and finger-pointing in the general direction of Apple. The furor over the Flashback malware seems to be receding a bit, and researchers say that the number of unique bots connecting to a sinkhole server dropped significantly over the weekend. But that doesn’t mean that the threat is over.
Google has released an update for Chrome that repairs a problem when users attempt to connect to sites over HTTPS. In some instances, the browser will return an error messages that tells the user that the requested site’s server certificate is invalid even when that’s not the case.
Nearly 200,000 people who receive benefits from the Medicaid and Child Health Insurance Plan in Utah have had their personal information–including Social Security numbers in some cases–compromised as part of an intrusion on the network at the Utah Department of Technology Services. The 181,000 estimated victims is nearly eight times higher than the 24,000 people that the department initially thought were affected by the attack.
The botnet assembled by the Flashback Trojan that’s been infecting Macs in recent months is turning out to be a rather difficult one to pin down. Researchers have said that the network of compromised machines may be upwards of 600,000, while newere estimates say that it’s more likely in the 500,000-Mac range. And now some researchers are questioning whether the entire botnet is made up of Macs or whether there are some Windows machines in the mix as well.
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