One year ago, virulent version of the Flashback Trojan was found which infected more than 500,000 Mac computers. Investigative reporter Brian Krebs has identified a young Russian man who he (Krebs) thinks was the mastermind behind the malware.
One year ago, Flashback.K was responsible for mainstreaming malware to hijack Macs even when users didn’t enter an administrative password. A window often used to appear on the computer screen mentioning users that an update to the “Adobe Flash” program is “available” and most of the users fell into that tricks and installed the updated version to the Adobe Flash program. Basically this update to the Adobe Flash program was a virus which later exploited security bugs in Apple’s version of the Java software framework. So, the users who installed the update became infected with no warning.
When Apple was trying to make a tool to counter the Flashback Trojan, at that time, still the malware was expanding its infection to other machines. As a result, over the past two or three months, more than 38,000 machines became infected.
Until now, the creator of Flashback OS X Trojan was unidentified, but after long research, Brian Krebs, an investigative reporter believes that he might have identified the person who has created the Flashback OS X Trojan malware. According to Krebs, the accused person is from Russia, and he is a VIP and and one of the top forum members of blackSEO.com websites, using a user name, Mavook.
Mavook sent a private message to Krebs on July 14 mentioning that he was the “creator of the Flashback botnet for Macs.” He also mentioned that he was “specialize in finding exploits and creating bots.” Asfter receiving such private message, Krebs then started to follow a series of digital breadcrumbs left on Mavook’s profile page and elsewhere.
But the fact is Krebs theory is totally based on private messages that presumably were leaked by insiders or people who hacked the forums. The information is only reliable if the original material is authentic and if the user Mavook was being truthful when taking credit for Flashback.
Do you find any smell in this matter? Feel free to share your thoughts with us and the rest of the world.
Source: Ars Technica
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