If you’re reading this, hoping for information about how to score yourself a free cheeseburger, I’m sorry to disappoint. Nope, this is about how Apple’s Macintosh security has fallen down and gone boom. Yes, that’s right. Just in the last couple of days it has come to light that some 550,000 Apple Macintosh computers have been turned into zombie PCs by malware that only infects Apple Macintosh computers.

The zombie virus, named Flashback, is a Mac OS specific piece of malware that exploits a security hole in Java that Apple has only just patched on Tuesday. A hole that had been fixed in Windows for six weeks. Flashback infects Macintosh computers with a backdoor (BackDoor.Flashback.39) after a user is redirected to a website where JavaScript code is used to run a Java applet containing the trojan. That backdoor can then be used for just about anything, such as loading even more malware onto the infected Mac, such as password sniffers, banking information stealers, search hijackers, etc.

If you’re a Mac owner, you should probably be patching Java immediately. And maybe checking to see just how much malware may be on your Mac.

And to anyone who claims that a Macintosh is more secure than any other PC (Windows, Linux, or otherwise): Welcome to reality.

Apple announces record Macintosh growth over 2011.  Apple Macintosh virus infection runs amok at the start of 2012.  Coincidence?  I think not.  It’s time for Macintosh owners to start taking their security seriously.

Fingerprint security just got (slightly) better. We all know scenes from movies, books, TV shows, etc. where at some point to get around some biometric fingerprint scanner the dastardly criminal simply lops off the hand of someone allowed to open the door. Or at least drags their recently-deceased personage ten feet to the scanner. Because fingerprint scanners don’t care if your fingers are still attached to your body, if you’re alive or dead, or for that matter if your finger is even a finger instead of a painted gummy bear.

Well, at least they didn’t used to care.

Enter Dermalog Identification Systems from Germany and their smart(er) fingerprint scanners.

They figure they’ve conquered the problem with a simple solution, look more closely at the finger. The thing is, you see, that when you press a finger (or any part of your skin) against something, it changes colors. Blood flow is altered, capillaries contracted to push blood elsewhere, and your skin pales in color as a result. This blanching-after-pressing is a measurable effect, and by looking for this blood-flow response in your skin tone as you press your finger to a fingerprint scanner, Dermalog figures they can prove you’re still alive. And not a fake finger.

Which sounds brilliant. And certainly is an improvement.

But when you think about it, a recently deceased guard or scientist is still going to give you passable results, especially if you’re still dragging the body around. Until the blood clots, which takes a couple of minutes, you can still easily get through at least the one door. More if you’re smart enough to kill by lethal injection of anticoagulant.

Extremely morbid security breaches aside, don’t go entirely dismissing the fake finger approach either. Because, you see, that measurable and documented change in skin tone they use to detect a fake finger? Yep, it’s known and documented. In fact it has even been published in Forensic Science International (where Dermalog claims to have used in their own research), so it’s not hard to find exactly what goals you need to replicate in order to reproduce it in a prosthetic.

Thus, near as I can figure, Dermalog doesn’t so much stop fakes as it just requires fakers to be a little more realistic in their fakery. I have to wonder if a simple latex skintone core surrounded by ye olde traditional gummy bear layer, with a dash of strawberry jam (or colored water) in between wouldn’t do the trick and be just as apt to pick up any print you desire. If that isn’t good enough, I’m sure there are other ways that would be. And ways that likely still just involve bringing in pre-made “blanks” that you can “print” on the spot no less. Maybe slightly more expensive to manufacture a fake, but I’m thinking still not all that expensive, and compared to the theoretical finances reaped in the burglary it’s used in, still very affordable to a criminal.

(I don’t even count spies because obviously spies get all sorts of neato gadgets like laser watches with no price limits attached. So obviously they can have a fake finger in their pocket that can fool any technique.)

So Dermalog has a nifty idea, at least until you account for the increase in smartness. Then you only catch the dumb criminals. The smart ones, who know to look for a brand when they case their target, will just make a better finger.

But hey, at least someone is trying.

And now, at least, when The Zompocalypse happens, and crazy Aunt Lulu leaves your family bunker and gets herself bitten, you don’t have to worry.  When she comes back to the door as the walking dead the fingerprint scanner won’t let her in.

Welcome to my second entry in A Round of Random Reviews.  We started with the worst, now we’ll go to the best, AMC’s original series The Walking Dead.  I’ve been chomping at the bit to review this one.  I tried waiting for the season to finish, but darn it, I just can’t.  It’s all been good, and with one episode left, they pretty much can’t screw it up now.

I just can’t even begin to say how nice it is that someone finally did a TV show worth watching these days.  If I had to sit through the release of yet another sappy vampire drama I was going to shoot myself.  (Well, okay, maybe not literally.  But I’d certainly want to.)  Especially since HBO put the final nail in the coffin of True Blood by straying so very far from the source … and then leaping and bounding even further away.  And don’t even get me started on yet another ghost hunter wannabe warrior for god and be damned with the science malarkey.  So to see someone actually take something supernatural that hasn’t had a significant presence, but really deserved one, is a breath of fresh air.

So to speak.

Because, I mean zombies must actually stink … right?

Anyway, so yes, zombies. Or in this case, walkers.  (Makes me wonder if they have crawlers, diggers, fliers, or something while they’re at it.)  It’s based on a comic book.  Sorry … graphic novel.  I almost even said that with a straight face.  Almost.  I’m sorry comic book fans, but honestly, it’s the literary equivalent of a cartoon.  It’s the journalistic equivalent of a blog.  (And no, the irony of that statement is not lost on me here.)  I don’t care how good the writing may be, how stunning the artwork, how noble, etc…  It’s still a freaking comic book.  Literary advancement through the centuries has created these things called words.

But I digress.

The Walking Dead.  It’s about darned time!  It was done well too.  I won’t say perfectly though.  I mean to start with, the protagonist, Rick Grimes, the slowest darned thinker to ever wake up in an empty hospital.  (Which, itself, is kind of cliche for a zombie theme, but we won’t go there.)  He’s not exactly the quickest on the draw, is he?  Aren’t protagonists supposed to be … better?  Though at least he does seem to get there in the end.  The thing is though, all of these survivors have been pretty darned obtuse.  Their little campsite is safe because they haven’t seen any walkers around it before?  How is that safe?  If walkers can’t even climb a ladder, all anyone has to do is not live on the ground or on the ground floor of a building.  A few ladders, a few barricades, a bit of welding, and they’re completely walker safe.  They’re walkers, not climbers.  But does anyone think of anything that simple?  Let alone build a wall from all them there trees and rocks and natural building materials laid out right under their noses?  And let’s not even get started on how many of them (All!) would have contracted such an infectious disease with the way they operate had this been anything even remotely approximating reality.  But maybe that’s the fault of the source, the graphic novel, and not the TV production itself.  I don’t know, not having “read” the source.

AMC presents their original series, The Walking Dead.

But regardless of all of its logic flaws and lack of survival skills, AMC’s The Walking Dead still kicks zombie behind.  I could do with a little less of the gross-out graphic head-staving, but visually, they did a great job on the zombification.  They’re certainly doing a service to the graphicness of the graphic novel.

Also as you can tell by the image above, there’s a bit of subtle humor worked into scenes.  “Do not enter” indeed!

And for the most part, it’s exactly what a zombie TV show should be.  Though certainly one in which there are less survivors than should be.  I hate to say it, but these people make the folks from the second season of Discovery’s The Colony look positively smart!

Uhhh … Gee, George…  Maybe we should think about defense.  Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh… what?  I forgotted where I was going with this.  Never mind.

Still, except for the rampant stupidity driving the human race to a needless extinction, it’s all good.  Especially that they’re avoiding ruining a perfectly good story with too much drama.  I mean goodness, that’s what completely ruined BBC’s Survivors for me.  Too!  Much!  Drama!  So I have to give The Walking Dead great credit for not falling down that rabbit hole.  Heck, if anything, they’re maybe a little guilty of not enough drama.  I mean I thought for sure they were going to labor on and on and on about the wife’s infidelity with the best friend and all that, even if it would have been kind of ridiculous since hubby was presumed dead and all.  A simple “mea culpa” would have been all it needed.  But they didn’t even go that far.  Don’t ask.  Don’t tell.  Alrighty then!  I guess?  A little unexpectedly cold, but better that than beating an undead horse.

Speaking of undead horses, did you feel bad for the horse?  I sure did.  Poor thing was happily living in his own little safe world until he was deputized.  At least whatever disease brings the dead back to life seems to work only on humans.  (So far.)  So thank goodness it was spared being turned into a zombie.  (But if it had, would that make it a trotter instead of a walker?)

But hey, it’s all good.  I’ve been greatly impressed and have thoroughly enjoyed The Walking Dead since its first episode.  My only real complaint is that there are only six episodes in this season.  Say what?  Six?  That’s a season now, eh?  TV these days.  Sheesh!  Well, whatever.  I will certainly look forward to season two.  They have a real winner here.  For all of its little flaws, I still give AMC’s The Walking Dead four and a half head-shots out of five.  And if you haven’t seen it yet, and even remotely consider the possibility of the zompocalypse ever happening, you should really give The Walking Dead a try.

In the world of computer viruses and hacking, we tend to think in terms of computers.  There is however a new threat emerging as our other devices become more and more capable of processing power and performing the same tasks as computers.  This is especially true of today’s smart phones.

So it comes as no surprise really, and yet at the same time as a considerable surprise, that we’ve now seen an attack on Symbian smartphones.

According to NetQin, mobile security experts, the Symbian S60 3rd and 5th generation operating systems have been targeted, infecting approximately 100,000 mobile phones with a virus that turns these smart phones into mass mailing zombies in a mobile botnet.

Right now the virus is disguising itself in hot topics such as the World Cup, which worldwide is an easy mark.  It has also been seen however with subjects such as the “most popular blind date TV show.”  So don’t expect it to be so easy to spot.

In fact it’s quite devious in that after it sends its virus emails and SMS texts with URLs linking to malicious websites that infect your Symbian smartphone, it then deletes the sent emails from your mail folders and texts from your SMS log, quite possibly leaving you unaware that any virus-ridden spam had been sent from your device to all of your stored contacts and phone numbers.

Which would explain how it is managing to spread so efficiently in spite of the narrow scope of devices the virus targets.

The NetQin team is, of course, working with mobile operators to block the malicious URLs and prevent the spread of this smartphone virus infection.

Now you just have to do your part.  Antivirus updates and being aware are, of course, suggested.  Now that your phone is capable of doing things that you used to need a PC for, you’re going to be suffering the same security threats as PCs do.  Welcome to the new mobile world.

Apple Macintosh computers have long gone unnoticed in the computer security world.  Mainly because hackers have rarely targeted them.  Why target a system with such a small market share when there’s Windows to exploit?  But lately the Mac is making headway in the war against Windows, and black hats have taken notice.

Bundled in with illegal downloads of things like Apple’s iWork 09 productivity suite and Adobe’s Photoshop CS4 from warez websites have come something new: A Macintosh-specific trojan horse virus.  And not just any virus, but a complex and elegant botnet.  Otherwise known as OSX.Trojan.iServices.A and OSX.Trojan.iServices.B, just iServices.A and iServices.B, or just generally grouped as OSX.Iservice, this botnet trojan is no simple bang-out from your average script kiddie.  It has its own peer-to-peer (p2p) engine, it has startup and encryption services, and it is designed around a highly adaptable structure.  In other words, it’s everything a dangerous virus should be.  And the botnet of zombie-Macs infested with this virus is already launching Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, just like you’d expect from a PC.

“The code indicates that, wherever possible, the author tried to use the most flexible and extendible approach when creating it – and therefore we would not be surprised to see a new, modified variant in the near future,” say virus researchers Mario Ballano Barcena and Alfredo Pesoli.  To which they add, “With malware authors showing an increasing interest in the Mac platform, we believe that more advanced [user interface] spoofing tricks may be seen in the future.”

I’ve been warning about it for a long time.  As Macs regain popularity (especially in light of the world disgruntled with Windows Vista) the “safety” of the Apple Macintosh is a thing of the past.  The only reason Macs traditionally haven’t been riddled with viruses like PCs have is because Macs are a niche market.  But as their market share grows, so too does the big bullseye on them.  We’ve been seeing more viruses hitting Macintoshes lately, and now we’ve seen the first true in-the-field Mac zombie botnet.  Mac security may never be the same again.  The curtain has been pulled, and we’ve found The Wizard to be nothing more than the same hackable software of everyone else.