The Flashback/FlashFake trojan is probably the biggest scare that mac users have ever got in the entire history of it’s existence.  There have never been any virus attacks on macs of this scale before and this attack could only grow further because of the growing popularity of the Mac OS among designers and casual users. The attack was unearthed by Kaspersky Labs, the Russian based computer security company, which estimates that there are roughly 600,000 infected computers worldwide and  98% of the infected machines were running Mac OSX.

The attack could have been beaten had Apple not delayed a security update which would have fixed a vulnerability inside Java for which Oracle had already released a patch for.

Users have been advised to update to the latest security updates to fix the infected machines. The trojan can grab usernames and passwords through a user’s browser by posing itself as a legitimate plugin for browsers. Once installed, it can send the collected information to a remote attack server.

This recent attack could force Apple to change it’s policy about how software is available for Macs since the reason why the attack took place in the first place was because Apple did not allow Oracle to issue the patch for Java.