{"id":4806,"date":"2012-05-30T18:17:41","date_gmt":"2012-05-31T01:17:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intego.com\/mac-security-blog\/?p=4806"},"modified":"2016-02-12T10:19:51","modified_gmt":"2016-02-12T18:19:51","slug":"flame-is-no-reason-to-panic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intego.com\/mac-security-blog\/flame-is-no-reason-to-panic\/","title":{"rendered":"Flame is No Reason to Panic"},"content":{"rendered":"

There has been a whole lot of talk over the last few days about a newly discovered threat called Flame. From a researcher perspective, this threat is a huge yawn for most of us. The functionality that is being touted as so smart and scary has been utilized by well-known malware<\/a> for well over a decade. And at this point, there have been only a few hundred to a thousand infections worldwide. Most of these infections have occurred in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

From where I sit, there are two notable things about Flame: it\u2019s programmed in a language that is much more commonly used for writing video games, and it\u2019s massive. Malware authors usually pride themselves on writing code that is as compact and efficient as possible, but this threat is dozens of times larger than your average malware. It\u2019s giant and bloated, which is why this threat will take so much longer than normal to analyze. That\u2019s not new and it\u2019s not cool. It\u2019s strange, and possibly a bit lame.<\/p>\n

From the perspective of the average user, the Flame coverage is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.<\/p>\n

For those of you in the Windows world, there is Zeus (aka ZBot), which is a much larger threat<\/a> that still has more infected users than Flame at its peak, partly due to its ongoing development and constant updates. Zeus too is spyware, with many advanced features to allow it to steal your data. At its peak, Zeus was infecting hundreds of thousands of users.<\/p>\n

On the OS X side, at its peak the Flashback malware had many hundreds of thousands of infected users, which is a much greater percentage of the total OS X user-base. Even months later, we see well over 100,000 users who are not heeding the warnings to secure their systems. While Flashback is not as full-featured in its spying capabilities as Zeus or Flame, that doesn\u2019t make it any less dangerous. As Zeus and Flashback have been much more widely distributed, they\u2019re stealing information from the average user around the world, not just in a small handful of countries and in certain targeted industries.<\/p>\n

There are many more mundane threats that are out there that should cause us genuine concern. There are many tens of thousands of Windows threats discovered every day, many of which have spying functionality. OS X is obviously not at that threat level, but it too is not immune from major malware threats.<\/p>\n

The lesson we should take from this is that there are a lot of unprotected users out there, which increases the threat for all of us. A user-base is like an eco system. If malware authors see a complacent user-base, it\u2019s an easy target. People who don\u2019t update their OS or other software to contend with security issues, people who don\u2019t use up-to-date security software, they\u2019re easy pickings.<\/p>\n

There are many users who think they\u2019re immune, or that malware infection won\u2019t happen to them. This is clearly not the case, and there are many people out there who are infected and unaware.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There has been a whole lot of talk over the last few days about a newly discovered threat called Flame. From a researcher perspective, this threat is a huge yawn for most of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[190,13],"tags":[163,153,80,86,149,162],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n