Flashback botnet not shrinking
Contrary to reports by several security companies, the Flashback botnet is not shrinking, the Russian antivirus firm that first reported the massive infection three weeks ago claimed today.
Dr. Web, which earlier this month was the first to report the largest-ever successful malware attack against Apple's OS X, said Friday that the pool of Flashback-infected Macs still hovers around the 650,000 mark, and that infections are continuing. Also on Friday, Liam O Murchu, manager of operations at Symantec's security response center, confirmed that Dr. Web's numbers were correct.
Both Dr. Web's tally and its contention that infections are ongoing flew in the face of other antivirus companies' assertions. Kaspersky Lab and Symantec, which have each "sinkholed" select domains -- hijacked them before the hackers could use them to issue orders to compromised machines -- used those domains to count the Macs that try to communicate with the malware's command-and-control centers.
