In the last days the Flashback trojan, which infected several hundred thousand Macs, received a lot of attention from everyone, except from those from Apple who were not too happy about the publicity the whole issue received. A company from Russia discovered how big is the problem by redirecting the traffic made by the Trojan to its own server and those from Apple did not want to collaborate with the Russians to solve the problem, they even tried to close the server they were using to discover the real number of infected Macs.
"They told the registrar this [domain] is involved in a malicious scheme. Which would be true if we weren't the ones controlling it and not doing any harm to users," says Sharov. "This seems to mean that Apple is not considering our work as a help. It's just annoying them." Sharov believes that Apple's attempt to shut down its monitoring server was an honest mistake. But it's a symptom of the company's typically tight-lipped attitude. In fact, Sharov says that since Dr. Web first contacted Apple to share its findings about the unprecedented Mac-based botnet, it hasn't received a response. "We've given them all the data we have," he says. "We've heard nothing from them until this."
The attitude of those from Apple is somewhat normal considering that such problems affect the "reputation" of the OS X platform, but perhaps they would have had more to gain if they did not try to close a server that apparently helps people find out how big the problem is. The Russians found out with difficulty the Apple team dealing with the security problems of OS X and it seems that the employees of the Cupertino company were not that communicative and we all know how much secrecy matters to Apple.
Although Apple has solved the security problems of OS X, those infected must use programs such as Anti Flashback to devirus their Macs.
