Free Republic

Contrary to recent reports, the worldwide botnet of Macs infected with the Flashback malware has remained relatively steady in size, the Russian security vendor Dr. Web said over the weekend. Dr. Web discovered the botnet -- which it calls BackDoor.Flashback.39 -- on April 4. It claims that more than 817,000 bots have connected to the botnet thus far, and that an average of 550,000 infected machines are interacting with a command-and-control server each day.

Over the weekend, I got an e-mail from an AppleCare support rep, who was responding to my recent reports of Mac malware being found in the wild. At least one prominent voice in the Mac community dismisses these reports as “crying wolf.” The view from inside an Apple call center says it’s for real: I can tell you for a fact, many, many people are falling for this attack. Our call volume here at AppleCare is 4-5x higher than normal and [the overwhelming majority] of our calls are about this Mac Defender and its aliases. Many frustrated Mac users think...