Is your Mac-OS under a virus attack..?

Mac OS X – the well renowned operating system by Apple, which was claimed to be virus free, has been hit by a massive virus attack from a group of Trojans, this week. So far the operating system has been guarded by a state of the art firewall and its own security software. Hackers somehow found a loose end in the java programming part and exploited it pretty well.

Reports states that the virus had hit almost half a million Mac users and almost 55% of them are in the United States. The virus has been designed to attack in the most furtive way possible. Unlike most viruses, users needn’t open any web page or manually download any application files to get infected. It is designed to download itself to a mac and thereby installing a backdoor and gain full access to the machine.

Once the machine is infected, it is found that the creators of the virus are exploiting the computers for click jacking and click fraud to manipulate ‘clicks’ for making illegal advertisement revenues. Since the backdoor is active, they can practically do anything they like with the infected machine.

There are many ways to infect the computer. One among them is displaying pop-ups to users which appear to be from adobe flash player, requesting users to install an update and typing in their password. This type of attack is referred to as ‘Fake flash’ or ‘Flashback’. Other one is by exploiting the loose ends in the Java framework thereby gaining access remotely and silently.

Oracle found the loop hole in java and issued a fix in February. Apple did not release a fix until late March. Apple also issued two security patches for the Fakeflash virus this week, and is encouraging users to update their software periodically.

The attack was discovered by Doctor Web, earlier this week and Kaspersky labs successfully intercepted their communications on this Wednesday by Reverse engineering the malware. It is found that almost 620,000 computers had been infected and 301,000 computers were in America,95,000 inCanada,47,000 inGreat Britain and42,000 inAustralia.

Earlier in May 2011, Mac has been hit by a malware called Mac Defender. It was discovered by a web security firm Intego, and Apple issued a patch for fixing the issue. The attackers are now targeting on Mac, as Apple’s share of PC market has grown to 12% and windows base antivirus solutions have achieved almost 95% effectiveness. Mac users can easily be trapped as they have been led to believe They are safe, and hence most people don’t care about the security features.

Dear mac users you can check if your mac is infected or not using this online tool from DoctorWeb, The firm who discovered the malware. If you believe your mac is still protected, add a little more security by installing this hotfix by Apple to prevent infection of their systems by Flashback Trojan. If your system is infected try this fix by F-secure Stay safe.!!