If you have a Mac, or any other Apple device for that matter, you should probably read this article by Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur

Apple says it will develop a tool to remove the Flashback malware reckoned to have infected more than 600,000 Macintosh computers worldwide, most recently via a flaw in Oracle’s Java software, following the worst attacks against the platform in the past decade.

But in a brief document posted on Wednesday, the company did not offer any advice on how users could find out whether their machine was infected, nor – aside from updating their software – how they could protect themselves against infection.

(The security company F-Secure has instructions so that Mac users can discover whether they are infected. Mashable also offers links to a pair of scripts that will check Safari – though not other browsers – for infection.)

The first variants of Flashback appeared last September, masquerading as updates to Adobe’s Flash player software. More recent variants exploited other flaws – notably in Java.

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If you have a Mac, or any other Apple device for that matter, you should probably read this article by Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur Apple says it will develop a tool to remove the Flashback malware...