“I know, most people think Macs can’t be infected, but look, you ARE Infected!” The Apple Mac OSX operating system is not what used to be in terms of security. An unknown author has created a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) for the OSX platform that goes by the name of ‘BlackHole RAT.’  Sophos has discovered the new Trojan and is now offering free protection services for Mac platforms as the current version of the Trojan posed low risks. The unknown author released a ‘beta’ version of the Trojan as in the future ‘improvements’ are to be expected on behalf of the threat. At the moment, the sore point is a backdoor of the Trojan, through which the hacker gains access without being detected, which acts as the server half of a client-server pair of applications.

Precaution is the right word when referring to how companies are currently dealing with security issues. Microsoft has learned a lesson from the recent matters in the health care system such as the H1N1 virus. The company is now advancing towards either issuing cryptographically signed health certificates that would be provided for users who had gone through various security check protocols to prove their machine was not dripping with malware before getting on something like a bank’s site or a local intranet, or alerting people to possible security holes ahead of when their machines have been compromised. That way, they could put fixes into place before encountering attack scenarios, as well as to avoid compatibility issues with sites and services.

Google has already withdrawn 21 popular apps from the Android Market due to malware threats, namely getting root access to the user’s device, gathering a wide range of available data, and downloading more code to it without the user’s knowledge. Given the increasing popularity of mobile devices and the emergence of the Android OS on many of these mobile devices, security companies will be given a hard time.