Despite the numerous tools released to detect and remove the flashback trojan, 140K Macs are still infected, according to Symantec’s official blog. Symantec Corporation is the largest anti-virus company in the world. If you haven’t heard of them you’ve probably heard of their Norton Antivirus brand, enjoyed by all of fourteen people who didn’t uninstall the security suite from their HP laptops the moment they got home.

 

While the number is down from Symantec’s estimated 600K from April 9th, a little over a week ago, that does leave an awful lot of Macs running with malware. The Trojan infected computers through a vulnerability in Java, which is also a exploited by OSX.Sabpab. Symantec recommends that Mac users update their virus signatures, and install the latest patches to their OSes and software (such as Java). Radical advice.

Semantec has made their Norton Flashback Detection and Removal Tool freely available, but they’re a little late to the party. Apple has already released their flashback removal tool, and methods for removing flashback have been available since April 5th. I somehow don’t think that the 140K mac users still infected with flashback were waiting for Norton security software to patch them up.

What did you install to replace Norton Antivirus? Let us know in the comments section below.