The malicious Mac OS X Flashback Trojan horse called ‘OSX/Flashback.A’ that infected more than half a million computers in early 2012, is still infecting computers today. Cyber-criminals tricked social network users into installing this Trojan horse by disguising it as a Flash Player download on a compromised or malicious website.
The Trojan horse targets a vulnerability in Java on Mac OS X system by tricking persons into visiting a compromised or malicious website with a carefully crafted Java Applet, which is used to download and execute malicious code from a remote location on the internet.
According to Intego, once a computer is infected with this Trojan horse, it will create a backdoor, which will allow hackers to access the infected computer remotely from anywhere in the world. With this access to the infected machine, hackers will be able to spy on the victim’s computer activities, steal his/her user names or passwords, use the same computer to commit other cybercrimes, or just do about anything that they want to.
Back in 2012, Apple Security team released a security update and a Flashback Trojan Removal tool to help protect uninfected computers from getting infected and to remove the threat from infected computers.
In early 2013, a few of Apple employees’ computers got infected with the same Trojan horse that took advanatage of the Java Security Bypass Zero-Day exploit, when someone at Apple visited a compromised website.
Now, almost two years after this threat was discovered, Intego has reported that at least twenty two thousand (22,000) Mac computers are infected with this dangerous Trojan horse.
How to protect yourself against the Flashback Trojan horse
To prevent your computer from getting infected or to remove this threat from computer, please download Apple’s latest software updates and the following Flashback Trojan removal tool:
Click here to download the Apple’s Flashback Trojan removal tool
Even if you think that your computer is not infected with this malware, please download and run the removal tool as a precautionary measure.
For more information about this threat, please click here.