For years and years, the Mac faithful have crowed about their technical superiority due to one major factor: the only competing consumer-grade operating system (Windows) had more security holes than a Swiss cheese factory. If you used a Mac, you were safe. Well … those days are over …
… in light of the Flashback malware, many are reconsidering that stance. Trend Micro, a long time developer of anti-virus and anti-malware software, put together a report of virus trends (PDF), and in it, they cite security firm Mitre, who claim that OS X had more reported vulnerabilities than anyone else. Welp!
Apple was said to have 91 reported vulnerabilities between January 2012 and March 2012. Granted, many of those vulnerabilities were isolated to a single program, Safari, and the vast majority of those vulnerabilities have been patched. But still, it just goes to show that OS X isn't as irreproachable as it may seem.
To be honest? Macs got sloppy. Virus creators go for what's hot, and for a long, long time the market share of Macs wasn't worth the amount of work needed to circumvent the security issues. Now? Macs are everywhere. Apple's the most valuable tech company in the world. Windows? Those guys are on the ropes. Virus creators can see the writing on the wall. Moreover, everybody at Apple's focused on the goose that laid the golden iPhone, so updates on Mac OS X may not have been as stringently examined. This stuff happens. This is what happens when you step up to the big leagues.
How Apple responds to this will show whether or not they're still the iconoclastic, hammer-tossing start up of Woz and Jobs, or if they've become the soulless corporate automatons they once struggled against, inspiring generations of people who might not have gotten into computers otherwise.
[Source: Gizmodo, eSecurityPlanet]