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>Mac market share will reach a tipping point and writing viruses for OS X will be lucrative Playing with the $59.99 "price" of Mac Defender it's probably only
by mishmash 15y ago
>Mac market share will reach a tipping point and writing viruses for OS X will be lucrative
Playing with the $59.99 "price" of Mac Defender it's probably only taken a dozen or so purchases to get a return on the design/HTML/CSS, the Cocoa, and hosting, etc. general development time required to put this together.
Depending on the numbers (un)reported - it's not hard to imagine:
a) Mac Defender is already profitable
b) it could become very profitable
c) other malcontents will likely recognize this...
So I think it reasonable to speculate the OS X malware inflection point is now.
- wtallis 15y agoOne successful product does not necessarily lead to a thriving market. The authors of Mac Defender have probably made a good return on their investment, but what counts in the long term is whether their customers have, in the form of stolen credit card numbers or botnet membership or whatever. If Mac Defender and it's forthcoming copycats aren't very effective tools, then we probably won't see an explosion. There will be some short-term growth, but Mac malware would quickly become a low-level endemic problem, instead of the multi-year epidemic that would be necessary for OS X to get to the state Windows is in. Mac Defender may mark the start of the arms race between malware authors and Apple, but I don't think there's any evidence yet to suggest that the arms race would proceed as quickly or as embarrassingly as it did for Windows.
- Steko 15y agoProfitable doesn't mean that it's more profitable then if the developer had written windows malware. Afghani farmers can make a profit with saffron but they keep planting poppies because they make a bigger profit.