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The first Mac Trojan has been detected and makes harm on Macs

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The first Mac Trojan has been detected and makes harm on Macs.

The first ever botnet consisting of Mac computers have been activated.

This is maybe the final proof that the Mac OS is no longer a virus free platform.

A botnet is a collection of computers that without the owners knowledge are connected over the internet. A computer gets infected by a virus, Trojan or other malicious software and becomes part of the botnet. This computer is from now a zombie in the botnet which is controlled by a group of cyber criminals through a sophisticated control system. This control system enables these persons behind the botnet to utilize the botnet for a variety of purposes. It could be as harmless to send spam email with offers to buy certain products, to more malicious tapping computers in the network or outside the network for vital information.

The botnet is used by the cyber criminals mostly to steal personal information, send spam and viruses and to perform ddos attacks. A ddos attack lets a hacker use several machines  and bombard certain IP addresses with requests and essentially get that IP address to stop working and off the web.

The first Trojans on the OS-X were detected in 2007, however almost none were infected by these. However, in early 2009 there were discovered Trojans in pirate copied software packages of iWork and Photoshop CS4. According to internet security company Intego as many as 20.000 computers were infected by this.

Reports out there now indicate that a botnet consisting of Mac computers infected by these Trojans has been activated and begun to attack other systems outside the botnet. An Australian blogger discovered this by seeing his computer ran at full force without any activity from his side was needed. By closer examination he found a small program that kept on attacking a web server.

A Trojan is not the same as a virus and you can not have it installed on your machine unless you perform an action to allow it to do so either. So far there is no reason to panic for the Mac users around the world as most Trojans are spread through pirate copied software, and if you stay away from these, you should be safer, however if the botnet increases in strength, it can reach your computer without you knowing it.

Symantec experts is of the opinion that a modified version of this Trojan is likely to come in near future and will become a higher risk to Mac users.

The Conficker based botnet is at the moment larger than 10 million windows based computers, and you should therefore be very restrictive running Windows on your Mac to avoid virus and Trojans.