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Russian Security Firm Dr. Web says they've discovered a botnet infecting nearly half a million Macs worldwide. The firm made their announcement on Wednesday about the more than 550,000 infected Macs. Later in the day, however, their malware specialist Sorokin Ivan increased this number, saying he had discovered more than 600,000 Macs on the botnet, with 274 of these Macs located at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, according to Ars Technica.
Though no other security firm has been able to corroborate these numbers, such a discovery raises concern for Mac users as they are usually less likely to contract a virus malware on their machines.
In a blog post describing the outbreak, Dr. Web said they had been studying the Trojan responsible for infecting the computers, called Backdoor.Flashback.39. Of all the infected machines, 12% were located in the UK, 19% were located in Canada, and more than 50% were housed in America.
Dr Web's blog said, "Systems get infected with BackDoor.Flashback.39 after a user is redirected to a bogus site from a compromised resource or via a traffic distribution system," it said. "JavaScript code is used to load a Java-applet containing an exploit. Doctor Web's virus analysts discovered a large number of web-sites containing the code."
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