December 3, 2008 by Mark Isle
It has long been the prevailing wisdom amongst Mac users that Apple software has little trouble from viruses because, to paraphrase Apple’s marketing department, their machines are built to be secure – implying of course that PCs aren’t. However, recently Apple have finally been acknowledging that their system is growing more and more susceptible to malicious software. A note even showed up on Apple’s support website recently, encouraging the use of more than one anti-virus programme, “So that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent.”
Apple will tell you that the security of their system is down to its solid BSD Unix foundation and up to a point they are right. However, the real reason that the Apple computers have been so untroubled by viruses traditionally is because of the relatively tiny proportion of computer owners who use them. Until recently a virus or malware programmer had very little reason to target an Apple Mac when he or she could affect around 20 times the computers by targeting PCs.
However, as this equation changes, they are starting to see the point. As little as four years ago Windows dominated the market with around 96 per cent of all computers using the system. They still dominate today but their share has fallen by about 7 per cent with Apple largely picking up the slack. Most analysts agree that this is the main factor behind the boom in virus authors targeting Macs and their applications.
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