DigitalSandbox

We have all heard the debates. OS X users proclaiming that their OS is immune to the ails of the Windows world. Windows users proclaiming that if Apple had more than a 3% market share they would be tragetted just as heavily.

I have always felt that the your-market-share-sucks-so-hackers-leave-you-alone argument was kind of hollow. Our market share isn’t huge, but there are still about 10 million Mac users out there (just made that number up, but you get the idea). And then OS X keeps getting more and more press about no viruses, spyware, adware, etc. You would think at some point a hacker would have come along and said, “man, there are a lot of Mac users out there with little to no security in place. I bet I could hack them pretty easy.” But it hasn’t happened.

The Oompa-Loompa virus trojan horse tried but managed very limited infection (numbered in the tens) and no real damage (it tried, but didn’t do anything bad). Then the flaw was patched in like a week and nothing has ever come of it. Even the recent Wifi hack has been shown to be a defect in a third-party USB Wifi adapter. Why would any MacBook user need one of those when every MacBook come with Wifi built in.

So I kind of figured that there was something better about OS X when it came to security. The thing is that while I am “good at computers,” I am not a hacker or anything close. So I lacked the knowledge to articulate an argument to back that up.

Fortuantely, someone else has. Is Windows inherently more vulnerable to malware attacks than OS X?

I am not saying Macs are invincible. Flaws exist everywhere and OS X is no exception. But it would seem that OS X has more going for it than a microscopic marketshare.