Apple ships Flashback removal tool for OS X 10.5 Leopard

Following the discovery of a 600K strong Flashback botnet, Apple has been trying to undo the damage to its reputation and has worked on issuing tools, patches and updates aimed at cleaning up the infected computers and preventing all of them from being infected again by this malware or by others misusing the same vulnerabilities.

After having pushed out the Flashback removal tool for OS X Lion (v10.7) and Snow Leopard (v10.6) in April, the company has finally issued one for its OS X Leopard (v10.5) users on Monday.

Still, unlike the Lion and Snow Leopard users, Leopard users will have to manually disable the Java plug-in used by browsers.

A security update for OS X Leopard – the first in nearly a year, and likely the last for a while (if not forever) – has also been pushed out on Monday.

It doesn’t address any vulnerability, but simply disables outdated versions of Adobe Flash Player – those older than v10.1.102.64 – and provides to the users the option to get the current version from Adobe’s website.

Last week’s update to Apple’s Safari browser has already disabled out-of-date Flash plugins found on Lion and Snow Leopard users’ browsers.