Despite Apple's release of numerous Java patches and an uninstaller tool, some 140,000 Macs worldwide are still affected by the Flashback trojan that was at one point present on 600,000 machines.
Although malware-affected Macs are on the decline, the numbers are at a point much higher than forecasted by software maker Symantec, according to a Tuesday post on the company's blog.
Apple has taken issue with the consumption estimates for its Maiden, N.C. data center included in a just-published "How Clean is Your Cloud?" report by Greenpeace, noting that renewable energy will provide 50 percent more of the center's power needs than the environmental advocacy group projected.
Rumors that Apple has been developing a smaller iPad -- which many have been referring to as the iPad mini -- for almost as long as the iPad has been around.
Late last week, Ciccarese Design published images of its own iPad mini mockups and its take on the device is unarguably beautiful. But while sources have indicated that Apple has developed a prototype iPad mini, many believe that it will never actually see the light of day.
In the mid-1990s, I ran across what looked like an incredible story: A teenager, dubbed the Whiz Kid, was selling a ton of computers from his parents' home. Newspapers told the story complete with images of the teenager talking on his cell phone—which, at the time, was a big deal.
Macs have been relatively safe from the kind of viruses that plagued Windows users through the last couple decades. But once it was revealed that a variation of Flashback was able to create a botnet of more than half a million Macs thanks to an unpatched Java vulnerability users stood up and took notice. OS X has largely been free of viruses and worms up to this point, but that still doesn't stop unsuspecting users from being tricked into typing an admin password into a cleverly (or, sometimes, not-so-cleverly) disguised installer.
Hard on the heels of the Flashback Trojan, Kaspersky Labs is warning of a new OSX threat, which it’s dubbed Backdoor.OSX.SabPub.a.
In a post to Securelist, Kaspersky’s Costin Raiu says the Trojan connects to a command and control server hosted on a Californian-based VPS associated with the Onedumb.com free DNS.
Coming on the heels of its Thursday Java update, Apple has released a separate program to remove the so-called Flashback trojan that has affected over 600,000 Macs worldwide.
Acclaimed French designer Phillippe Starck revealed in a recent interview that he has been working with Apple on a "revolutionary" new product that will be revealed within the next 8 months.
Starck revealed the information in a radio interview with France Info, as discovered by HardMac. No further details were given on what the product may be.
iOS and iTunes users have been bumping into new and stricter security measures in order to use their accounts.
The new security demands, apparently implemented yesterday, have been asking users to choose three security questions and answers that are then required to download a new app from the App Store. A backup e-mail address is also being required, presumably in case a user's primary address and associated Apple ID become compromised.
The number of Apple Macs infected with the Flashback malware seems to be shrinking as Internet security software vendors roll out tools to detect and remove the exploit and run “sinkhole” operations to reduce its effectiveness.
According to security vendor Symantec, the number of infected systems worldwide has shrunk to 270,000, less than half of the more than 600,000 discovered by two other security firms earlier this month.
