

- #WHAT IS THE MAC EQUIVALENT OF TARGET FOR WINDOWS SOFTWARE#
- #WHAT IS THE MAC EQUIVALENT OF TARGET FOR WINDOWS WINDOWS#
Gostov seemed to base his opinion on the fact that Windows machines provide a GUID (globally unique identifier), Microsoft's implementation of the UUID standard. "I have some suspicions that probably bots for Windows also present." "We are not sure that all 500K are Mac users," said Aleks Gostov, a chief security expert with Kaspersky, in a message on Twitter on Thursday. Not every researcher bought into Doctor Web's numbers. "But there are other ways we can use to see similarly large botnets." "If you had a sinkhole, you could get a more granular idea of the size ," said Liam O Murchu, manager of operations at Symantec's security response team, discussing the duplication of Doctor Web's work. That would require the same kind of access to the Flashback command-and-control infrastructure that the Russian firm claimed to have obtained.īut several companies said they were working on the problem, including Kaspersky, SecureWorks and Symantec. None of the researchers or companies contacted by Computerworld were able to definitively confirm Doctor Web's numbers, however. They're all vulnerable to the same exploits."
#WHAT IS THE MAC EQUIVALENT OF TARGET FOR WINDOWS SOFTWARE#
" toolkits include exploits that could be easily modified to run on any OS, especially those for vulnerabilities in Java, Flash Player and other software that runs on any operating system. "In fact, I'm actually kind of surprised that Macs aren't targeted more frequently," added Stone-Gross. Atlanta-based SecureWorks is well-known for its botnet research. "The number is entirely feasible," said Brett Stone-Gross, a security researcher with the Counter Threat Unit of Dell SecureWorks. The sheer size of the WordPress installed base and the scope of the WordPress injection campaign means that it would not have been impossible for hackers to poison more than 600,000 Macs. Blackhole tries multiple exploits, including several aimed at Java bugs on Macs, to compromise machines. Those usurped WordPress sites have been redirecting users to malicious URLs, where hackers have hosted the Blackhole exploit kit. WordPress is a popular open-source blogging and content management platform used by about one in seven websites. That's been ongoing since at least early March." "There have been mass compromises of WordPress sites, and the controllers match the domain structure Doctor Web described. "A lot of things happened at the same time," said Mike Geide, senior security researcher at Zscaler ThreatLabZ. Among the clues, they said, were the Flashback gang's use of a zero-day Java vulnerability that Apple patched only this week, the tactic the cybercriminals used to infect unwary Mac owners and the availability of operating-system-independent, Web-based exploit kits.
