Deep in an article about botnet hunters over at the Washington Post was this little tidbit...
A few months ago, [David] Taylor became obsessed with tracking a rather unusual botnet consisting of computers running Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. Working a week straight, Taylor located nearly all of the infected machines and had some success notifying the owners of those systems, but the Taiwanese ISP the hackers used to host their control center repeatedly ignored his requests to shutter the site.
A botnet of infiltrated computers running Mac OS X? Has anybody heard of this? I can't see how if such a security nightmare such as this actually happened to Apple that C|net and ZDnet would sit on the story. I don't believe it's in their mission statements to be kind to Apple. I find it hard to believe that security firms looking to grab some headlines would miss this big event. Even the few Mac anti-virus companies who blow most minor vulnerabilities out of proportion have been silent.
I searched www.Shadowserver.org's RSS feeds and found no mention of this botnet for Linux or OS X. I'm prepared to write this off as either intentional FUD or just poor reporting. However, considering the recent events in the Mac community I'll hold off just yet. If any of you reading this have more information, would you kindly post it here? I'd really like to look into it if the story is legit.