There will be a reprieve for Apple computers users in light of the significant drop of Apple FlashBack trojan infections announced by software security firm. According to a report published by Symantec, the infection of the Apple computers has dropped to less than half of the over 600,000 infections that were noted last week by the Kaspersky antivirus vendors.

The welcome trend is thanks to various antivirus tools that have been made available to Apple computers users in the past weeks to fight the barrage of attacks from the FlashBack Malware. Some of the tools that have been useful include virus detection and removal apps. Jeffrey Burt reports on eWeek that some of the tools run "sinkhole" operations to reduce the impact of the malware. Symantec posted on its blog on April 11 that the sinkhole operations that the company implemented and monitored, saw the number of infections drop from as high as 380,000 to 270,000 within a 24 hour time frame.

According to eWeek, "The sinkhole operation not only enables Symantec to monitor the FlashBack malware, but also to prevent the exploit from contacting the command-and-control servers for more instructions, rendering the malware benign." The infections statistics released by the Symantec officials show that the hardest hit Macs are in the United States constituting about 47.3 percent of total infected Apple computers. The records show that Macs in Canada are the second hardest hit by the wave of FlashBack infections adding up to about 13 percent total infections in Canada. The cleanup operation also picked up several IP addresses that were being used in the attacks by some of the FlashBack variants. Officials quoted in the report state that the identified IP addresses are no longer serving the malicious content associated with OSX.FLashback.K.

The officials also stated that they were nonetheless still monitoring the trends closely in case the FlashBack crew are planning to resuscitate their attacks. The ravaging Flashback malware, which has been operating as a classic Trojan, was detected last year and has been in operation for over six months. The malware is disguised as an update to Adobe Flash Player from where it derives its "FlashBack" title. The attackers released updated versions of the malware in late March this year with the sinister variants disguised as drive malware. The newer releases attack systems when users access compromised malicious websites hosting the malware.

IT giant Apple has come under fire for the loopholes in its operating system that has a Java code prone to malware attacks. A week ago Oracle had attended to the flaws in Windows computers as well as in other systems and only last week Apple released security and clean-up patches to Mac users. Many Mac users have been riled by the slow response of Apple to the FlashBack scourge. Dr. Web CEO Boris Sharov was quoted stating that Apple needs to change its approach to working with the security community. Sharov reportedly mentioned that he did not hear from Apple after he sent the tech giant all the details he had gathered on FlashBack malware.

(reported by Gugulethu Nyoni, edited by Surojit Chatterjee)