21st Century Learning and Teaching

Oxford Muses on Mac Flashback: Worst Outbreak Since Blaster

So how bad was last month's Mac Flashback outbreak and who suffered the most? Our guess: it was bad, and university IT help desks.

And it looks like our guess might not be far off the mark.

===> Oxford University Computing Services' network security team (aka OxCERT) has written that they dealt "with what is probably the biggest outbreak since Blaster struck the Windows world all the way back in the summer of 2003." <===

OxCERT dealt with around 1000 incidents for Blaster. They've seen several hundred Flashback incidents… "and they keep on coming."

Read more...

On Monday, I provided steps on how to avoid your Mac being compromised by the Flashback trojan. Today I will provide information on how to locate a Flashback infection.

To better understand the steps below, it is better to also know a bit about Flashback. It's an OS X malware family that modifies the content displayed by web browsers. To achieve this, it interposes functions used by the Mac's browsers.

The hijacked functions vary between variants but generally include CFReadStreamRead and CFWriteStreamWrite: read more...