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Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Still, the Mac situation is a little nicer. If, at Thanksgiving dinner, someone mentioned liking Macintosh because one can ignore the whole anti-virus thing, most people would nod (even if you would be an exception). But if another someone mentioned liking their new PC because one can ignore the whole anti-virus thing, the turkey talk might not be that pleasant.
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If that happened, I would say the nodders bear a striking resemblance to little woolly animals in herds.
Macs are not immune to viruses.
The flashback trojan infected more than 1% of Mac machines worldwide this past Spring:
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Security experts have long argued that Apple has underplayed the threat to Mac users from cyber criminals.
In April they pointed to the Flashback Trojan outbreak, which affected roughly 600,000 owners, more than one per cent of the worldwide total.
Spread by malicious websites, it masqueraded as an update to Adobe Flash and used a vulnerability in Java, a programming language widely used online, to take control of OS X. It was used by cyber criminals to run a “click fraud” scam, which redirected victims to advertisements online, but could have been used to online banking credentials or other sensitive data.
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Moreover, Apple was criticized for waiting 3 months to patch the vulnerability.
I suspect that the biggest reason Windows has been more susceptible to viruses than the Mac is because those who wrote the nasty programs just didn't bother to do so for the small installed Mac base. The payoff was just so much larger for Windows.
--Pat