600,000 Macs worldwide affected by the deadly Flashback virus

A recent tweet from the Russian malware analyst Ivan Sorokin at Dr. Web claims that the ongoing Flashback Trojan has infected over 600,000 Macs worldwide

An Ars Technica report on the tweet reportedly includes 274 machines from the even the Apple headquarter, Cubertino.

57% of the infected Macs are located in the US while 20% are in Canada, Dr. Web elaborated.  Alike the older versions of the malware, the latest Flashback virus looks for an infected Mac for a number of antivirus applications before it generates a list of botnet control servers and begins to check the process with them.

Since the unveiling of the Flashback Trojan last September, the authors have been tweaking the software, adjusting its tactics several times to include both social engineering tricks and an exploit of vulnerability.

The latest version of the Flashback Trojan that was launched earlier this week, has been exploiting a Java vulnerability which was left un-patched on the OS X. For the same, Oracle has released an update closing the hole in Windows in February, while Apple has yet to fix the issue for Mac. The delay in the fix for Mac is mainly due to the company maintaining its own Java updates that are usually deployed after the Oracle has issued its corresponding updates. Just a day later, Apple had to update Java to address the vulnerability being exploited by the Trojan.

Users can even check if their machines are infected by the Flashback Trojan, by just following the simple instructions given by the Antivirus Firm F-Secure. The method involves only a couple of commands running in Terminal followed by other simple instructions.

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