Flashback Check for Regular People  

Update: So we’re now at 34,000 downloads and counting.

Some of the news today has been about a nasty trojan targeted at Mac users that has apparently infected 600,000 machines.

While most of these infestations probably occurred in September or October (when the trojan first hit), Apple didn’t actually patch its version of Java until this week.

Surprisingly, the schadenfreude from the anti-Mac users has been less than I’ve seen in the past. The lack of “see, Macs aren’t that secure” comments I’m seeing are kind of eerie, to be honest.

However, as a Mac enthusiast and a person who is often the most tech savvy person in her circle of friends, family and co-workers, I was faced with a dilemma: How to make it easy for people to check to see if their computers were safe, without having to force them to use Terminal.

For lots of people, Terminal is a scary place and users just don’t want to go there. Thus, I whipped up two of the ugliest AppleScripts in all of existence to automate the process for my co-workers.

After seeing the feedback on that end, I decided to publish my work for the community at large.

Over 12,000 downloads later, I think I can call this a success.

If you (or a loved one) wants a way to check to see if they have the Flashback trojan but don’t want to bother with Terminal…the scripts are located here.