Dr. Web says 3 to 4 new infections occur daily, though the botnet is shrinking

Aug 13, 2012 09:16 GMT  ·  By

After discovering and reporting on the famous Flashback trojan infecting around 800,000 Macintosh computers worldwide, Russian security firm Dr. Web now reports that some 140K infections are still lingering.

Dr. Web says the number of bots in the largest botnet BackDoor.Flashback.39 continues to steadily decline. The firm recorded around 200,000 bots operating in the network at the beginning of July, and 148,492 at the end of the month. By now, that number should have shrunk to about 140,000, according to a chart provided by the security vendor.

Dr. Web outlines that, “despite the release of operating system updates, anti-virus software for Mac OS X, and an array of tools to remove BackDoor.Flashback.39 offered by various companies, newly infected Macs are still joining the botnet, though their number at present does not exceed 3-4 computers per day.”

The graph displayed above shows how the number of BackDoor.Flashback.39 bots changed in the month of July.