Symantec Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Flashback was earning about $10K per day

by Steven Sande (May 1st, 2012)

People often wonder about what motivates the creators of malware. In the case of the Flashback malware that infected several hundred thousand Macs, it turns out that the motivator was money. A post on the Symantec official blog listed the stages of infection from Flashback: A user visits ...

Flashback infections down from over half a million to under 150,000 in eight days

by Kelly Hodgkins (Apr 18th, 2012)

According to Symantec, the OSX.Flashback.K infection is declining each day. The current number of infected Macs is now around 140,000, down from 600,000 a week ago. If you think you may be infected, you can run a Flashback removal tool from either Kapersky or F-Secure. Apple also has a tool ...

Scammers exploit Apple iPad fever

by Mike Schramm (Feb 1st, 2010)

And now we're at the point in the iPad cycle where there's just enough information out there about it that people are interested, but not enough that they can discern credible information from scammers. That's the report of the BBC, which says that "hi-tech" scammers are using iPad-based searches to ...

Pirated iWork contains botnet trojan, breaks hearts

by Aron Trimble (Apr 23rd, 2009)

The tubes are ablaze today with news from CNN of the first ever latest malicious program to be found on the Mac. The trojan was first discovered in January but it did not receive wildfire-like popularity until recently when two experts at Symantec published a bulletin on the subject of the malware. ...

FUD: Windows is "most secure OS"

by Mat Lu (Mar 22nd, 2007)

Andy Patrizio has an incredibly sloppy story entitled "Surprise, Microsoft Listed as Most Secure OS" at internetnews.com, which purports to summarize the recently released Symantec Internet Security Thread Report Volume XI. But if you look closely at the actual report (PDF), you'll see that this ...

Symantec: No file infecting viruses for OS X

by Scott McNulty (Jul 14th, 2006)

Every time I write about Mac security the comments fill up with people telling me that I am an idiot (actually, come to think of it, that happens with most of my posts). Therefore, I thought some of you would enjoy this post from Symantec that which states categorically that there are no known file ...

Symantec offers an update for OSX.Leap.A

by Dave Caolo (Feb 16th, 2006)

Well, here's something you don't see very often. Symantec has issued an update that offers protection agains OSX.Leap.A, the Mac Trojan Horse that we wrote about earlier. They classify it as a "level 1" on a scale of 1 to 5, so there's no need to slip into panic mode. It seems to be ...

Symantec responds to security issue

by Scott McNulty (Dec 27th, 2005)

Symantec is aware of the flaw that is in almost all of their software (that's gotta hurt) and the most recent virus definitions include a 'heuristic detection for potential exploits of the Symantec decomposer RAR archive vulnerability.' What the heck does that mean? The vulnerability can only be ...