2012-05-01
Abstract
Flashback botnet estimated to have generated $10,00 per day.
Copyright © 2012 Virus Bulletin
The Flashback Mac OS X botnet may have generated up to $10,000 per day for its operators, according to researchers at Symantec.
The researchers reverse engineered the various components of OSX.Flashback.K in an attempt to determine the motivation behind the attack, and found that an ad-clicking component is loaded into Chrome, Firefox and Safari, where it intercepts GET and POST requests from the browser. The malware focuses on Google search queries and redirects clicks from infected machines so that the attackers receive the ad revenue.
Last year, Symantec’s researchers estimated that a botnet measuring in the region of 25,000 infections could generate its author(s) up to $450 per day through ad-clicking trojans. Scaling this up to the 700,000 Mac machines that made up the Flashback botnet at its height, the researchers calculated that Flashback could easily have generated $10,000 per day.
The biggest Mac botnet seen to date seems to have hit academia pretty hard, with Oxford University’s network security team (OxCERT) reporting what was ‘probably the biggest outbreak [they had seen] since Blaster’ – several hundred Flashback incidents having been dealt with on university systems and infections continuing to appear. Manchester University in the UK also warned students and staff about the trojan, saying that the majority of infections were occurring within the university’s halls of residence. The university’s Mac users were urged to install anti-virus protection.
Eugene Kaspersky set the cat among the pigeons last month when, referring to the spread of the Flashback trojan, he declared that Apple was ‘10 years behind Microsoft in terms of security.’ His comment sparked debate among members of the anti-malware community as to the relative merits of Apple versus Microsoft security policies and procedures – but perhaps he had a point when it comes to Mac users themselves. As Kurt Wismer put it in a Twitter comment: ‘It’s not surprising, but it is somehow amazing that people are still arguing against running AV on their Macs.’
