OSNews

"Nobody really cares to write malware for OSX because less than 10% of people actually use it."

"That argument is really getting old now. The mac market share has been steadily growing for years, yet we haven't seen a surge in mac malware."

Doesn't matter if it's old or not, it is still true.

Also, I'm surprised nobody here has mentioned/remembers that in last year's pwn2own contest apple's mac was not only the first to fail, but the only one to fail on day 2 in which attackers were allowed to open malicious emails/web addresses on the machine.

http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/gone-in-2-minutes-mac-gets-hack...

Clearly this hacker wasn't out to exploit apple users in the wild, but he had an original zero day exploit, so he could have.

It's only a part of the truth so it's incorrect to present it as the reason why macs aren't targeted by malware.

All it appears to be is a leaked proof of concept. Mac fanboys can mod down my original post all they like, but the points are still valid. Nobody really cares to write malware for OSX because less than 10% of people actually use it. "

That argument is really getting old now. The mac market share has been steadily growing for years, yet we haven't seen a surge in mac malware.

And I think people modded you down because you're just repeating that old questionable argument, not because they're "Mac fanboys". [/q]

The Mac marketshare has been steadily growing by less than one percent each year. That hardly deserves a surge of interest. The largest figure I have seen for Mac marketshare worldwide is 7%. More often it is quoted as being around 5%. The fanboys always quote the American marketshare where I believe they just reached 11%. No Mac fanboy ever thinks to question it and thinks that it reflects the wider picture too.

The argument that Mac owners are richer and therefore deserve the attentions of malware writers is extremely poor mathematics. Mac owners would have to be on average 19 times richer than the average PC owner to make the effort worthwhile. As affluent as Mac owners tend to be, I doubt the gap is that wide.

That's still millions of computers. And if they're that easy to exploit it would make perfect sense to write malware for them.

The reason why hackers target windows is not only because it's larger market share but also because of bad design decisions up until Vista:
* Automatically executing whatever that's on an inserted CD or USB-stick.
* OS-integrated web browser
* ActiveX and its various security problems.
* Lots of services running and listening on ports by default.
* Users gets admin accounts by default.

XP still has a majority market share.

And when trying to fix these problems MS made a new misstake: UAC. It's too easy to grant applications elevated privileges and it shows up too often so users learn to click ok by routine.

So the reason why hackers dont't focus more on the mac is not only due to it's market share.

Some people said the same thing about firefox btw when IE had something like 80-90%, but firefox never became a big target for malware as IE was despite its large market share today.