Java: The Osx And Cross-Platform Nightmare

snoopy · Apr 10, 2012

April 9, 2012, 11:32AM
Java: The OSX and Cross-Platform Nightmare

For a few days now I've been asking myself the following question: Which is more important: The fact we had a 500k-strong OSX botnet fly under the radar or the culprit that enabled the malware to infect so many machines? Every time the answer is clear - Java has become an absolute focal point in the cyber threat landscape. It plays a major role in attacks against every major platform, including mobile.

It's quite clear that Java/Oracle has become the new Adobe. But where Adobe has been (successfully) investing heavily in techniques such as sandboxing it remains awfully quiet on Oracle's side. It becomes even more painful when you consider that Java was the first third-party application/(browser) plug-in the bad guys really went after back in 2005. It was only after successes against Java that the criminals started going after the Adobe (and other) products.

Somehow, we've let Sun/Oracle get away with doing next to nothing to improve the situation for the better part of a decade. Shame on us, and shame on them.

Going back to the Mac/OSX Flashback malware - I think it's clear nobody expected quite so many infected machines out there. With few people on OSX running security software it's very hard to get an accurate reading for how many threats there are in the wild.
Obviously, the situation is worse than anticipated. We're talking about an epidemic roughly the equivalent of Conficker here, when you look at the percentage of each user base infected with the specific malware. That's just amazing.
Click to expand...

Story - http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/java-osx-and-cross-platform-nightmare-040912

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