The biggest Mac malware attack of all time – blogger names suspected mastermind

The remote Russian region of Mordovia, famed for its prison camps, may be the home of the author of the most notorious malware ever to hit Mac computers – the Flashback Trojan horse (called OSX/FlshPlyr-A by Sophos products).

The Flashback malware hit more than 600,000 Mac computers in early 2012, posing as a bogus installer for Adobe Flash and exploiting an unpatched vulnerability in Java.

Despite the malware’s prevalence on Mac computers and the high media profile it achieved after even hitting hundreds of Mac computers in Cupertino, the computer crime fighting authorities have made no arrests in connection with Flashback.

Award-winning security blogger Brian Krebs has written today about his investigation into who might have been behind Flashback.

Krebs’s investigation took him to…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.