For some time now there’s been a sort of urban myth around that ruled iOS based devices are the safest in the market, given that there wasn’t malware that could attack it. But a recent discovery showed that MACs today are more vulnerable than ever before as more and hackers have learned the insides of the system. A staggering report says flashback malware got to 600K MACs so far.

It’s in Apple’s own marketing strategy: choose MAC over Windows because our systems “just work”. Well, as it turned out that particular selling pitch isn’t exactly accurate anymore. The truth is that even if Apple bragged about how safe their systems were, hackers were using the time to get more familiar with the iOS. Eventually it was just a matter of time before internet hacking geniuses would get the hang of the iOS.

Security researchers with Doctor Web released a report on Wednesday that showed about 600,000 MACs have been infected with a flashback malware of the new generation. The malware installs on your computer thanks to the use of Java exploits which don’t exactly need the user to click on something in particular.

Apparently the matter was indeed urgent enough, particularly since the flashback malware has indeed ravaged a significant number of computers. On Tuesday, Apple made available an update for Java that is supposed to handle the issue reported by Doctor Web. As the report concludes, despite the hard work of people with Doctor Web, more than 550,000 MAC OS X systems have been damaged by the Trojan malware.

At the same time, there’s one other concerning aspect: the number of flashback malware infected MACs is constantly on the rise, and customers in the U.S. seem to be the most vulnerable. As Doctor Web points out, 56 percent of all the MAC OS X systems infected are within the United States. In fact, it seems that the infected MACs have even been identified in Cupertino, the place where Apple has its headquarters.

What’s interesting is that Apple has failed to address the issue of the malware installed through Java exploits, although it’s been something it knew about for some time now. Whether or not it was pride or bad judgment, there are over 600K MAC users that would have definitely benefited from an earlier release of the fix.