Mac Viruses In The Rise? I Think Not.

Somewhat ironically, a good long time ago, well before any of today’s pundits were trying to suggest that Windows isn’t really that insecure and the Mac isn’t really any better, there was a time in the 80s that Macs did suffer from regular infections, at least if you were in a school setting where kids were passing around floppies infected with boot sector viruses. That was in the days before Microsoft ported the Mac desktop to the PC and called it Windows. A lot has changed since. (Correction: There Were Never Any Mac Boot Sector Viruses )

I've been saying this to anyone who will listen, yet many still argue against reality. Prior to Mac OS X, there were plenty of mac viruses and malware. OS 9 (and 8, and 7, etc.) had hundreds of viruses in the wild, actually infecting machines. This was at a time when the Mac market share and total number of machines in use was exponentially *smaller* than it is today...yet the idiot pundits claim that "market share" is the reason there are no viruses (yet) for OS X, and that as it continues to rise in popularity, the viruses will start popping up. Any day now. No, seriously. Real soon. They've been repeating that mantra for the past 7 years.

Until then, you can rest assured that every article you read about a wide spread virus attacks is really about Microsoft Windows. Of course, there will also be those sneaky articles written in CNET and Wired and the Register that insinuate that trojan horse attacks are the same thing as viruses because they are both “malware,” just like stubbing your toe and the Black Death are both “health-related issues.”

Yep.

I enjoyed that article as well. Like gecko above, I remember a time when the Mac OS was as vulnerable as Windows - the Next purchase and implementation of BSD as the core radically changed the vulnerability landscape for Apple and the MacOS. I was hoping that Microsoft wooing the open source community meant they were looking at a more secure and robust core for themselves as well.