For years, Mac users have been told that not only are they cooler than their PC counterparts, they are safer too. Apple has always held that computer viruses and malware dogged only its competitors.
That is no longer the case.
This week, security researchers discovered that a new computer virus had infected half a million Macs — about half of them in the United States. The virus is infesting the computers in the most surreptitious way possible: users need not manually click on any malicious links or manually download any malware to get infected. The program simply downloads itself. Once downloaded, the malware’s creators gain a back door that gives them unauthorized access to the victim’s computer.
“This is the largest scale attack on Mac OS X to date,” said Roel Schouwenberg, a senior researcher at Kaspersky Lab, an antivirus software company, who has analyzed the malware. “And much more sophisticated.”
However what they’ve neglected to mention is a cure. I’ve found a cure, and it is currently in use in our company.