New Mac Trojan horse disables Apple's automatic malware updates

F-Secure has reported on a new, scarier-than-usual Mac Trojan horse. The good news is that you can only get infected if you double-click on a rogue file masquerading as a Flash installer. The bad news is that if you do fall victim to the Trojan, it disables your Mac’s automatic malware definition updates. 

F-Secure has dubbed the new pest Trojan-Downloader:OSX/Flashback.C; Macworld reported on a previous version of the malware back in September. A Trojan horse works by fooling you into running it; in this case, Flashback disguises itself as an installer package for Flash Player. 

The earlier incarnation of the Flashback Trojan horse sent information about your Mac back to a remote server, which was bad enough, but this new version disables the security definition updating mechanism Apple first introduced in Snow Leopard back in May; the same malware protection is included in Lion, too. 

Original Article: http://macw.us/mY4iNp