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One In Five Macs Holds Malware — For Windows
judgecorp writes "One in five Apple Macs is infected with malware, according to Sophos. But most of that is harmless to the Mac... it is Windows malware ready to be transmitted to the Windows population. Only one in 36 Macs has OS X specific infections."
In biological disease, there's a phenomenon called a carrier. For reasons unknown, the person is infected, but doesn't show any of the symptoms and never will. They are however able to infect others. As such, they are still considered infected. I think that's how the mac is considered infected.
After going through the links to find a better source, I think I understand what happened.
The study comes from Sophos, with data collected from computers which downloaded their free anti-virus for Mac.
The most commonly found malware on the Macs was apparently fake antivirus scareware. My guess is that a lot of users saw the fake browser popup telling them a virus was found, and then clicked on it. This started a download which didn't run, but now they have a malware binary in their download directory that they can't use.
These are the people who downloaded free anti-virus from Sophos. No correlation.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."