Do you use a Mac? Well, if you do, you might have seen in the news recently that there is a new piece of malware called Flashback Trojan that is affecting Macs. This piece of malware is not technically a virus because it will not spread itself to other machines. A virus and a trojan horse are both malicious pieces of software. Trojan horses masquerade as something that to most would consider helpful and then attempt to trick the user into installing it. Once installed, it will make your computer vulnerable to a number of bad things. The Flashback.Trojan was originally discovered as an Adobe Flash plug-in installer back in September of 2011, but since has morphed to take advantage of vulnerabilities in Java. Oracle has released an update that addresses the Java vulnerabilities and this past week Apple released its java update as well.
If you are using a Mac first thing you need to do is run Apple Software Update and install the Java updates. You can then go to the F-Secure website and follow the steps listed to find out if you are infected and if so how to remove the infection. The last thing you can do is disable java within safari.