The number of Macs infected with the Flashback malware continue to decline but it’s not entirely clear to what degree. Initial numbers estimated that there were about 600,000 infected computers in total yet those numbers dropped last week to 237,000 and now, according to research by Symantec published last night, remained around the 140,000 mark this week.
Microsoft issued six patches, four of which were critical in the April 2012 software updates.
By Roel SchouwenbergFor a few days now I’ve been asking myself the following question: Which is more important: The fact we had a 500k-strong OSX botnet fly under the radar or the culprit that enabled the malware to infect so many machines? Every time the answer is clear – Java has become an absolute focal point in the cyber threat landscape. It plays a major role in attacks against every major platform, including mobile.
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.
For companies that are in the business of collecting, storing or monetizing user data or processing large numbers of transactions, it’s a matter of when, not if, they will suffer a major compromise or data loss. Most recently the giant wheel of pain stopped on Global Payments, but a weird thing happened on the way to Internet infamy: the story kind of died.
The topic of this program is often how to prevent security issues and attacks, but the reality is that company’s need to understand attacks and how to respond to attacks after they happen. In this episode, Alex Horan of Core Security and Ted Julian of Co3 join Threatpost Editor Paul Roberts to discuss what happens after the breach.
UPDATED–Global Payments, the payment-processing company that was the victim of a massive data breach revealed last week, said that the attack appears to have compromised something less than 1.5 million credit card numbers and that the attack looks to have been isolated to the network in North America. However, there are some details of the incident that are raising questions in the security community about the timing of the intrusion and what data was taken.
Following previous announcements from Visa and Mastercard, electronic credit card processor Global Payments Inc. acknowledged late Friday that its system was breached earlier this year.Global Payments announced via press release that a portion of its processing system had been compromised in early March and that company credit card data “may have been accessed.”
When one Pennsylvanian man couldn’t foot his bills, he opted to steal the identity of someone that could – one of the world’s richest men, Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Paul Allen.
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