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Flashback Malware: Redux
Last week I reported on the news that an estimated 600,000 Macintosh computers had been infected with evil software called Flashback. In that piece, I copied two command-line entries that were reported by virus trackers to detect whether the malware had affected your computer. I ran those commands on my system, of course, and they came up clean
This morning I had a notice from Apple Software Update that a new upgrade to Java was available. This patch, I was informed, protects against the Flashback attack. I ran the update as I almost routinely do.
Immediately after the install completed, I was presented with a dialog informing me that Flashback had been detected on my system and eradicated.
So it appears that either those first two command-line attempts to detect Flashback were unsuccessful or they have been since worked around by those who spread this evilware. I swear, if I live to be 130, I'll never understand vandalism in any arena. Just makes no sense to me.
Second Lion Crash. Now I'm Concerned
I just had my second gray screen of death in less than a week after several years of never seeing one. Both of these crashes have been on my home machine, a Mac Mini.
I've also been experiencing display weirdness. My HP w2338h monitor -- which I love when it behaves -- has been "fuzzing out", going to all-static display. If I turn it off and back on, it is fine. Sometimes I've waited to see if it would self-correct. Once it did after only about 15 seconds or so. I'm wondering if the two observations are related.
Because I make heavy use of my system all day, I have a hard time isolating a possible cause of these kinds of issues. What am I supposed to do, spend an entire day running only one app? But then I don't always see these problems even when I'm running all my favorite apps. That's one of the problems with complexity, I guess; the more of it you have, the more chaos you create.
If you have seen similar issues, I'd appreciate hearing from you. Maybe together we can dope this out. Meanwhile, I'm just glad Apple has improved the OS enough that I didn't lose any unsaved data in either hard crash.
Gray Screen of Death But No Data Loss!
Tonight -- or rather early this morning -- I experienced the first Gray Screen of Death on a Macintosh I've seen in so long I can't remember the last one. It was sudden and inexplicable. First, my Bluetooth Logitech keyboard lost its connection to the system; this has happened a lot in recent months. Before I could even react, I got the dreaded gray washdown over my screen and the black-and-white, multilingual message telling me I had to restart.
When it happened, I had an open document in TextEdit I hadn't saved. It wasn't very long but it was made up of a bunch of ideas that had begun to gel about a new kind of social network. It was important stuff for me. I could certainly recreate it but would I lose some of the spontaneous stuff that makes such middle-of-the-night gotta-write-this-down idea generation scintillating the next day?
Oh, well. I powered off my Mac Mini, waited a few minutes, and restarted it.
Not only did the system restart cleanly, there was my unsaved TextEdit document exactly as I had left it when the bleedin' demise of my Lion system had happened. I nearly shouted with glee. If my wife hadn't been sleeping in the same room, I might have done so.
So this is just another good reason to keep using Mac for me. For all I know, Windows would be just as brilliant in helping me recover from a system failure but none of my personal experience suggests that would be the case.
Thanks, Apple.
