[By Sudarshana Banerjee]

It was a matter of time before virus writers and malware marauders started targeting Macs with the same undivided attention reserved for Windows machines. With the growing popularity of all things Mac, that time is here. Doctor Web, a Russian anti-virus vendor, conducted a research to determine the scale of spreading of Trojan BackDoor.Flashback that infects computers running Mac OS X. It estimates Flashback encompasses more than 550,000 infected machines, most of which are located in the United States and Canada.

A recent version of Flashback exploits a security flaw in Java in order to install itself on Macs. In addition to the Java vulnerability, the Flashback malware relies on computer servers hosted by the malware authors to perform many of its critical functions. Apple is working with ISPs worldwide to disable this command and control network. Apple also says it is developing software that will detect and remove the Flashback malware.

Apple released a Java update on April 3, 2012 that fixes the Java security flaw for systems running OS X v10.7 and Mac OS X v10.6. If you are running an earlier version of Mac OS, you may be infected, or at the very least, vulnerable. You may want to consider looking for anti-virus, or updating your operating systems. For an easy fix, disable Java on your Web browsers.

Dr. Web offers a free online Web utility that lets you check if there was a connection from your computer to the botnet control server. At the time of writing, the utility had checked 92342 Macs, and found 1857 infected (about 2 per cent).

By default, your Mac automatically checks for software updates every week, but you can change that setting in Software Update preferences. You can also run Software Update at any time to manually check for the latest updates.

[Image Courtesy: Apple]