CVE-2008-5353

Market share! It’s an easy answer, but not the only one. In 2011, Apple was estimated to account for over 5% of worldwide desktop/laptop market share. This barrier was a significant one to break – Linux maintains under 2% market share and Google ChromeOS even less. This 15 year peak coincided with the first exploration by the aggressive FakeAv/Rogueware market targeting Apple computers, which we discovered and posted in April 2011 and later in May 2011, which no longer seem to be such an odd...

Infected machines, not blank-eyed shuffling fanbois

The Mac-specific Flashback Trojan created a zombie army of 550,000 Mac machines by exploiting a Java hole that Apple only patched on Tuesday, six weeks after Microsoft plugged it up on Windows machines. This is according to Russian anti-virus firm Dr Web, which arrived at the figure after it successfully managed to sinkhole one of the command-and-control servers used to control Mac machines hit by the latest attack. The legions of compromised zombies were mostly located in the US (56.6 per cent,...

Java-based exploits and phishing on social networks dominate

Win7 infection rates rose during the second half of 2010 even as malware hit rates on XP machines declined, according to official statistics from Microsoft. The latest edition of Microsoft's Security Intelligence Report shows an infection rate of four Win7 PCs per 1,000 in the second half of 2010, up from three Win7 PCs per 1,000 during the first half of 2010. The rise of more than 30 per cent contrasts with a drop of the infection rate, albeit from a much higher starting point, for older and le...