Posted on Monday, April 16 2012 @ 20:34 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Bright Side of News
reports Macs are now targeted by a new virus that exploits a vulnerability in Microsoft Office:
This latest virus is found to infect users through word documents. The only way that one can actually obtain this virus is if the user actually downloads the word document and opens it. Once opened, the document will execute its commands and infect the computer as the word document is actually a malformed one with the virus embedded into it. The Flashback virus, though, actually required absolutely no participation on the user's end as it embedded itself into the user's system purely by the user browsing the internet and the virus taking advantage of a Java exploit. Java is a runtime.
Apple has already patched the Flashback Trojan, but not until 600,000 computers had been infected. Hopefully, this time Apple will work with Microsoft to close this hole relatively quickly. Apple has a history of not being particularly open about vulnerabilities nor how many systems are actually infected.
