Over half a million Macs infected by Trojan 

Amid its rising popularity, the Mac OS X is facing its first widespread malware infection since the operating system was launched 11 years ago.

A Trojan called “Flashback” is wandering around the web, trying to infect Mac computers and give full control of infected computer to another computer, warned a Russian antivirus company last week.

This Trojan reportedly infected more than 600,000 Macs since last year, with most infected Macs located in the United States and Canada.

The infection is unusual since Apple computers are usually much less likely to be attacked than their PC counterparts.

The Flashback Trojan poses as an installer for Adobe's Flash player, which is required by many websites.

“Systems get infected after a user is redirected to a bogus site from a compromised resource or via a traffic distribution system”, said Russian antivirus vendor Dr. Web.

“JavaScript code is used to load a Java-applet containing an exploit. Dr. Web's virus analysts discovered a large number of websites containing the code”.

Most of the infected websites are listed in the .nu domain (assigned to the island state of Niue), and many are related to movies and TV streaming services.

Although the infection is classified as “low”, Apple has already released a security update which should remove the Trojan automatically, warned users not to open unfamiliar files or attachments and advises to update the OS in case users haven’t already.

Users were also asked to turn off Safari's setting for opening safe files automatically, as the Safari browser is set automatically to open “safe” files, like the ones ending in “pkg”.