Mac attacks rare, but real – eat your words oh Mac zealots

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 22 October 2006 20:58

Your IT - Entertainment

There’s no question that, today, Macs are much more secure than Windows based PCs. This is thanks to a more secure operating system, but it has also been because of a smaller user base that presented a smaller target for malware and virus writers. However the smaller user base argument is not necessarily the case today, thanks to the rise and rise of the iPod and the iMac.

Why bother if hardly anyone would get affected? What virus/malware writing glory is there in that? But the invasion of Mac malware began some time ago, and both everyday and self-righteously invincible Mac users need to be aware: your Mac is not secure, and neither is anything else in the Universe.

When Apple tried to blame Microsoft for a Windows virus appearing on new iPod Video 5G models from September 12 for a couple of weeks, the blogosphere reacted. Where was Apple’s integrity, they asked?

Of course, Apple apologised, but trying to shift the blame only brought the spotlight firmly onto Apple, as has been the case all week. A number of articles, besides my own ‘Virus scare a lesson for Apple’ article on ITWire, also dared to question the myth of total Mac invulnerability to viruses and spyware, and tried to gently remind Apple users that owning a Mac does not bestow a shield of invincibility around its owner, no matter how much you believe it to be true.

For this, I was slammed by self-righteous Mac owners around the world. How dare I question the Mac OS? What qualifications did I have? I should be barred from ever writing articles about the Mac ever again... and so on, and so forth. If anyone ever thought the PC vs Mac battles had ever subsided, here was direct proof that nothing had changed in years. John Dvorak knows how I feel, and I know Stan Beer does too.

Of course, few of my detractors have any knowledge of my technological expertise gained over more than two decades. The very, very short version is that I have been around computers since the age of four in 1979, two years before the introduction of the IBM PC, and it was thanks to the foresight of my father who chose to buy one and bring it home. It was the Exidy Sorcerer (do a search on Google!)

My second computer was an Apple ][ clone. Since then, I have owned dozens of computers, used all the major operating systems, fixed innumerable problems for people on a range of computing platforms, and have helped a lot of Mac owners especially in the past three or so years with computing questions and issues, including software installation, backup, printer setups and the like.

In that time, I have helped to fix precisely zero viruses or malware outbreaks on a Mac system, but after experiencing issues with software or just trying to make things worked, I quickly realised the warm glow that Mac OS X was giving me was just showing me that problems exist on a Mac – they’re just different to the ones PC owners are used to.