Apple Hit by Hackers ⇥ loopinsight.com

Apple PR, in a statement to The Loop:

“Apple has identified malware which infected a limited number of Mac systems through a vulnerability in the Java plug-in for browsers,”

Hackers are certainly getting a lot of mileage out of that vulnerability. Reuters reports that Apple was hit by the same group that targeted Facebook last week:

Facebook revealed on Friday that unidentified hackers traced to China had staged a sophisticated attack by infiltrating its employees’ laptops, but no user information was compromised.

Also revealed in the past few weeks were attacks targeted on the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. All of these have come from China; specifically, according to the Times, an office tower in Shanghai:

While Comment Crew has drained terabytes of data from companies like Coca-Cola, increasingly its focus is on companies involved in the critical infrastructure of the United States — its electrical power grid, gas lines and waterworks. According to the security researchers, one target was a company with remote access to more than 60 percent of oil and gas pipelines in North America. The unit was also among those that attacked the computer security firm RSA, whose computer codes protect confidential corporate and government databases.

If you want to see one of these hackers at work, The Next Web has a screen recording of just that. It’s fascinating, albeit scary, stuff.

Update: Contrary to Reuters‘ report, it appears that the Facebook, Apple, and Twitter malware originates in Eastern Europe, according to Bloomberg, not China.