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I have a tendency to agree with you. For viruses, the numbers don't add up. I couldn't find numbers for how many viruses/worms were written last year. In 2004 t
by g_lined 16y ago
I have a tendency to agree with you. For viruses, the numbers don't add up. I couldn't find numbers for how many viruses/worms were written last year. In 2004 there were around 28000 written, so let's assume viruses are on the decline and say 8000 were written last year. With a 5% share, Apple should have anything up to 400 viruses. I am aware of none.
I think the reason for this is two fold, firstly, to write a viruses on the Mac, which by their nature need to spread, is harder due to the (*nix) security models used. But also, it seems to me viruses are getting passé and targeted emails with trojans are becoming more popular.
Trojans are one thing that Macs have been shown to be susceptible to although often by fooling (social engineering) the person into clicking all the right buttons and typing in their password.
I would therefore suggest that any future major problems on OS X will be due to a trojan that gets sent out and manages to auto install through an exploit rather than a virus which does the spreading on its own.
The challenge for Apple is being good enough, fast enough to make sure trojan attacks are relegated to social engineering and tainted pirate downloads.