Virus

Virus

People have asked me, "How many viruses do Macs really have?"

I never have had a clear number. I know it's not many, but how many is that?

If you take how many Windows had last year, 114,000; And their percent of computer market held, 97%; vs Apple's market percentage, 3%; you come up with 3420 viruses.

But we know that's not true. It's not that many. But how many?

I recently came across a bog post which explained it real well. To avoid redoing all the research he did I will use his numbers and go from there.

To summarize his research, he found only 26 viruses for Macs. And all of those were for older Macintosh operating systems. Some people claim that Macs have no viruses because no one knows or cares that they exist. So? If the machine I am using is safe because of obscurity, I'm good with that.

Just some time ago there was a virus reported for Macs. Lots of people made big deals about the end of Mac's security as we know it, bla bla bla. Looking deeper, the only way for a Mac user to become infected with this virus was to go to a porn site, download a file, unpackage the file, run the installer, type the administrative access code, complete the instalation, and run the application. "Breach of security"? I don't think so. That's a user error, not a Mac error.

When Leopard was released, people pounced all over the "weak" firewall full of holes. "Ha, Ha, Mac failed, Ha, Ha." Within a week Apple released an update that fixed that problem. No one even exploited it when it was open. I'm not seeing the failure here.

I had always assumed that I should put a viruses protection program on my Mac (I never did because I procrastinate), just because people sold them for Macs. But 26 viruses to protect from, on an older operating system no less. I think not.

Referenced blog:
http://www.macobserver.com/editorial/2003/08/29.1.shtml