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    • Posts Tagged: Dr. Web

    A Little Sunshine / Security Tools — 18 Comments
    12
    Apr 12

    How to Find and Remove Mac Flashback Infections

    A number of readers responded to the story I published last week on the Flashback Trojan, a contagion that was found to have infected more than 600,000 Mac OS X systems. Most people wanted to know how they could detect whether their systems were infected with Flashback — and if so — how to remove the malware. This post covers both of those questions.

    Screen shot of Flashback detection tool from Dr.Web

    Since the discovery last week of the Flashback Mac botnet, several security firms have released tools to help detect and clean up Flashback infections. Dr.Web, the Russian antivirus vendor that first sounded the alarm about the outbreak, has published a free online service that lets users tell whether their systems have been seen phoning home to Flashback’s control servers (those servers have since been hijacked by researchers). The service requires users to enter their Mac’s hardware unique user ID (HW-UUID), because this is how the miscreants who were running the botnet kept track of their infections.

    F-Secure Corp., the Finnish security firm that worked with Dr.Web to more accurately gauge the true number of Flashback-infected Macs, has a Flashback Removal Tool available for download from its Web site.

    Where is Apple’s response in all of this, you ask? Apple says it is developing software that will detect and remove Flashback. Inexplicably, it has not yet released this tool, nor has it added detection for it to the XProtect antivirus tool built into OS X. The company’s advisory on this threat is predictably sparse, and focuses instead on urging users to apply a recent update for Java. Flashback attacks a well-known Java flaw, but it’s worth noting that Apple released the Java patch only after Flashback had begun infecting hundreds of thousands of Macs.

    Update, 8:22 p.m. ET: Apple just released a new version of Java that includes a Flashback remover. Java for OS X Lion 2012-003 delivers Java SE 6 version 1.6.0_31 and supersedes all previous versions of Java for OS X Lion. It includes no new security fixes, but it adopts a novel approach to the debate over whether to temporarily disable or remove Java: “It configures the Java web plug-in to disable the automatic execution of Java applets. Users may re-enable automatic execution of Java applets using the Java Preferences application.” If the Java web plug-in detects that no applets have been run for at least 35 days, it will again disable Java applets.

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    Latest Warnings / Security Tools / Time to Patch — 58 Comments
    4
    Apr 12

    Urgent Fix for Zero-Day Mac Java Flaw

    Apple on Monday released a critical update to its version of Java for Mac OS X that plugs at least a dozen security holes in the program. More importantly, the patch mends a flaw that attackers have recently pounced on to broadly deploy malicious software, both on Windows and Mac systems.

    Distribution of 550,000 Flashback-infected Macs. Source: Dr.Web.com

    The update, Java for OS X Lion 2012-001 and Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 7, sews up an extremely serious security vulnerability (CVE-2012-0507) that miscreants recently rolled into automated exploit kits designed to deploy malware to Windows users. But in the past few days, information has surfaced to suggest that the same flaw has been used with great success by the Flashback Trojan to infect large numbers of Mac computers with malware.

    The revelations come from Russian security firm Dr.Web, which reports that the Flashback Trojan has successfully infected more than 550,000 Macs, most which it said were U.S. based systems (hat tip to Adrian Sanabria). Dr.Web’s post is available in its Google translated version here.

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    Other / Security Tools — 43 Comments
    29
    Mar 10

    Removing Viruses from a PC That Won’t Boot

    One of the more common questions I hear from readers with computer virus infections is, “How do I get rid of a virus if I can’t even boot up into Windows to run an anti-virus scan?” Fortunately, there are a number of free, relatively easy-to-use tools that can help on this front.

    The tools in this review are known as a “rescue CDs.” These are all free, Linux-based operating systems that one can download and burn to a CD-Rom. Once you’ve configured your PC to boot from the CD you’ve just burned, you can use the CD to scan your hard drive, and — depending on the type of rescue CD you choose — even copy files to a removable drive.

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