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Intego's "Year In Mac Security" Report
david.emery notes the release of Intego's "Year In Mac Security" report (PDF), adding: "Mac OS X and iPhones that haven't been jailbroken fare pretty well (although vulnerabilities exist, there's not been a lot of exploitation). Apple does come in for criticism for 'time to fix' known vulnerabilities. Jailbroken iPhones are a mess. The biggest risk to Macs are Trojan horses, often from pirated software."
I ran a Windows computer at work. And I had one at home. Never had a problem.
Then I went to another office. We had to spend a fair amount of time researching on the Web. All it took was one person landing on an illicit web site, and the shit hit the fan. All of a sudden, one after another, everybody's hit with trojans and God knows what else. No IT guy to run the thing, so I became the informal computer guy. Several computers are taken out and got the OS rebuilt. The only way to protect against the exploit that hit us is to update the OS. I do so, everything's fine with my machine. One computer after another gets hit with "You may be the victim of pirated software." Uh-oh. Turns out the boss bought the licenses for the software we used with Windows 2000. So then he upgraded to XP, but before the Microsoft Malicious Software (?) removal tool, nobody knew. Now it's picking up the proprietary program, reading the license, and going uh-uh. Can't upgrade. The new licenses would be about $8,000 per computer per year. (From the third-party software vendor. They only sell their program with the support, which costs that much. And they urge you to upgrade to the new version, which is another $13 grand.)
But we're going into recession. Not going to happen. So we have to go back to IE6 and Windows 2000 on some computers. They get hit again with web-based malware. It infects other software on the network. Could a good IT guy have fixed this? Yeah. We had 8 employees, and suddenly the phone wasn't ringing with the big contracts.
In the meantime, the Mac we had on the network for graphics and video conversions -- running like a top. Sure, I know. There are warning signs that show up on Security experts' blogs. Never, since I got a Mac in 1986, had an actual piece of malware. I realize I was a bit lucky in the early days, but I didn't exchange floppies with idiots, so I didn't get those old viruses.