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Mac Malware Outbreak Is Bigger than 'Conficker'
- tar 15y agoThis is a very misleading title.
- coderdude 15y agoThat's weird, an article about Macs that isn't being up-voted fervently. (I kid, I kid.) Interestingly enough, by "bigger" they just mean that a larger percentage of Macs are infected compared to the percentage of Windows machines that were infected by Conficker (when compared to the total number of machines in use on each side).
- tar 15y agoProbably because it paints Macs in a negative light.
- chicagobob 15y agoHmmmm ... I just read a blog post (Ars??) that upto 1% of Macs could be infected. What percentage of Window machines did Conficker infect? 30% 50%? I seem to remember it was a huge percentage.
- fjarlq 15y agoEstimates vary... here's one: "It's estimated that at its peak Conficker infected more than 11 million PCs globally." -- http://www.sophos.com/en-us/security-news-trends/reports/security-threat-report/html-04.aspx http://www.sophos.com/en-us/security-news-trends/reports/sec... Numbers in the range 15-25 million were also tossed around. It's hard to estimate. Steve Ballmer expected the Windows installed base to cross the 1 billion mark in mid-2008: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-expect-windows-installed-base-to-hit-1-billion-by-mid-2008/596 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-expect-windows... Conficker peaked around January 2009 I believe. At 10 million that would be 1% of 1 billion.
- aw3c2 15y agoStupid linkbait headline (on the source, submitter is not to blame). Their first paragraph clarifies: (...) the Flashback Trojan botnet is even bigger than the massive Conficker botnet… relatively speaking. That's all there is to this "article".
- ghshephard 15y agoI take issue with one of the claims in this article, 'Apple isn’t to blame for the threat. The vulnerability is in Java, not Mac OS X' if Apple decides to ship a component with their OS (as they do with Java) and takes responsibility for upgrading the components - then it is their blame if they delay the patch for a month and allow all these additional machines to be infected. Hopefully we'll see a 'malware removal' patch from Apple in the next five days or so.
- sxcurry 15y agoA lot of these reports are based on data from Russian antivirus vendor Doctor Web. Does anyone have any information on Doctor Web, and how valid their counting methods are?
- mikenon 15y agoKaspersky confirmed the number. https://www.securelist.com/en/blog/208193441/Flashfake_Mac_OS_X_botnet_confirmed https://www.securelist.com/en/blog/208193441/Flashfake_Mac_O...