More than a week now we learn that 600.000 Macs are infected by the Flashback trojan, a type of malware that quickly came to the attention of journalists. Seeing that the problem came to the attention of the press from all over the world, Apple tried to solve it quickly and updated the Java based on which the Trojan works, and the company's efforts proved to be successful. On April 16, only 142.000 owners of Macs infected with Flashback were registered, according to Symantec, so Apple's effort helped devirus three-quarters of the Macs exploited with this trojan.
The Flashback program installs on an un-patched machine and attempts to harvest web browsing activity, usernames and passwords. It then sends that information to its network of computers across the internet. It is what's known as a 'drive-by' infection because it can install itself on your machine after just a visit to an infected page, without any administrator passwords or installation procedures necessary.
It was normal for the problem not to be solved in a single week, but what Apple managed to do is amazing, but unfortunately another trojan discovered recently could give those in Cupertino even more trouble. The problem with this type of malware is that it doesn't ask the user to log in as an administrator to infect the system, so a user's Mac can be infected without them knowing and probably soon many will choose to install applications like antivirus on your own computers Until then, be very careful which websites you browse and which emails you open because you might get infected very easily.
