Apple has moved to limit the damage caused by its belated patching of a security vulnerability by targeting the controls at the centre of the Mac botnet.
The Mac maker came under fire recently when it emerged that a six-week old critical flaw had been left to fester by Apple, with cyber criminals attacking the weakness using a piece of malware called Flashback.
Apple did eventually release a patch for the problem, but not until 600,000 machines had been infected and turned into a botnet to target banking data. Now Apple’s going after the command servers running the network and will release further tools to detect and remove the Flashback malware, which could remain on computers even after they have been patched.
Apple is working with ISPs worldwide to disable this command and control network
“In addition to the Java vulnerability, the Flashback malware relies on computer servers hosted by the malware authors to perform many of its critical functions,” the company said in a statement. “Apple is working with ISPs worldwide to disable this command and control network.”
According to Apple, the Java update released last week fixed the Java security flaw for systems running OS X v10.7 and Mac OS X v10.6, but the company said it was still “developing software that will detect and remove the Flashback malware”.
The detection tool from Apple is still a work in progress days after security firm Kaspersky released free detection and removal tools for the malware.
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