A long time ago, one of the reasons to get a Macintosh computer was that there were few nasty viruses or other malicious junk floating around that could affect your machine. However, this kind of attitude can only lead to trouble and now the Russian security company Doctor Web says that one particular trojan called Backdoor.Flashback.39 has infected over 550,000 Apple computers.In a botnet, infected computers receive commands via the Internet from malicious operators. The collective power of these infected machines can be used to bring down websites, send spam en masse, or whatever the botnet’s operator has in mind. For instance, one version of the Flashback trojan modifies the content of webpages viewed by the user.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=99982