A Week After Apple's Fix, Flashback Still Infects Half a Million Macs 161
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "Security firm Dr. Web released new statistics Friday showing that the process of eliminating Flashback from Macs is proceeding far slower than expected: On Friday the security firm, which first spotted the Mac botnet earlier this month, released new data showing that 610,000 active infected machines were counted Wednesday and 566,000 were counted Thursday. That's a slim decrease from the peak of 650,000 to 700,000 machines infected with the malware when Apple released its cleanup tool for the trojan late last week. Earlier in the week, Symantec reported that only 140,000 machines remained infected, but admitted Friday that an error in its measurement caused it to underestimate the remaining infections, and it now agrees with Dr. Web's much more pessimistic numbers."
Re:Well clearly (Score:5, Interesting)
That's what TFA says. The infected machines haven't had the updates installed. That implies that the owners either don't know that they are infected or don't care. I'm leaning towards the former.
With the number of machines that remain, it seems clear also that Mac users aren't using auto updates. What's up with that?
makes more sense (Score:5, Interesting)
I had wondered how in the hell it got that low that fast--a couple of days after Symantec reported 140,000, they or someone else reported 30,000. But checking the Java vulnerability against versions installed with Mac OS X, it seems that 10.4 and 10.5 should also be vulnerable, while Apple only patched for 10.6 and 10.7. That alone should prevent the numbers dropping so far so fast. Sigh. Smooth move Apple.
Re:Apple didn't issue fix 10.5, 16.5% of it's user (Score:1, Interesting)
My issue is Macs are expensive and therefore mac users do not upgrade as often. The old Mac argument was that a PC would go obsolete in 3 years while mac users will use their machines for 7 years or more and still get support.
MacOSX does not get updates if you are just a few years old. Many people buy used macbooks because of the price and are getting let out. Many do not even know they are not supported.
I hope you are right about Apple. They should at least let their users know to upgrade for the latest security threats ... assuming you can if you are first generation intel owners or powerpc.
The numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
Do they port scan 1000 random machines and extrapolate from there? I'm genuinely curious to know their methods. How could they arrive at such a precise number? Surely they must only have a sample of macs and use statistical models to extrapolate, right? They can't scan all the macs, right? right?
How do they do it?!?!
Re:Well clearly (Score:4, Interesting)
And once again, it doesn't do even the above if you're logged in as a regular user. You have to manually kick it off to even find out there *are* updates.
It's not hard to kick it off, but it is something you have to bother to remember to do. Which, "your parents" probably do not ever really think about.
Apple articles always frustrate me (Score:1, Interesting)
I really do wish that the articles on Apple could actually be useful and we could discuss, if this is hitting computers that were patched, or not. How do you check your computer, with links to whatever that site was that gave a step by step. Whether or not Apple's fix's are actually fixing, or if us Mac folks should look for a third party solution. That kind of information is always abounding on other articles, why not here?
I wish Microsoft... (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)