Flashback attack and MacOS vulnerability

I know I've been remiss in keeping up with this blog and the latest news out in the security and proxy industry, but sometimes life happens.  With that in mind, I'm going to recap probably the most important bit of news that happened over the last couple of months, and that was the reminder to everyone that Macs and specifically MacOS isn't completely protected from malware.  The Flashback virus was widely reported on and was estimated to have infected over 600,000 Mac computers.  Bigger news was of course that Apple first ignored the news reports and then slowly came around and said they would fix the flaw that caused the vulnerability.

But the big question for many of course, is whether any of the devices on their network helped to prevent the attack from happening, and this wasn't something that any vendor had an answer to.  But Blue Coat Systems while they didn't claim to protect you from Flashback, they did claim they helped prevent an infected system from reporting back to the botnet systems collecting data from compromised Macs.  You can read about how they did this on their security blog.