Flashback malware infects 2% of all Macs

04-09-2012 • http://www.computerworld.com, By Gregg Keizer

Nearly 2% of the Macs whose owners have checked their computers have been infected with the Flashback malware, according to a Russian antivirus company.

Of the 55,000 users who have used Dr. Web's free tool to determine whether their Macs had been infected by Flashback, just over 1,000 have been told their computers harbor the malware and are part of a growing botnet.

That means approximately 1.8% of the checked Macs are infected.

To put the Flashback infection rate into context, Conficker, a worm that plagued massive numbers of PCs from the fall of 2008 through the spring of 2009, infected as many as 4%-5% of all Windows systems at its most active.

Dr. Web's free tool matches the UUID (universally unique identifiers), a fingerprint of each individual Mac, to the list of infected systems the company compiled after "sinkholing," or commandeering, a command-and-control (C&C) server that took calls from compromised computers.