It take active neglect to disable standard safety features. Unfortunately, our nanny-state culture trains us to disable all those annoying safeguards as a matter of course. Tired of the nagging “Time to Upgrade” warnings? The simplest way to shut it up is to remove your safety suite.

But this doesn’t have to do with the OS, but with the ignorance of users. A Word script can conquer a Mac as easily as a PC.

The money people are willing to spend on their computers. Apple concentrates its efforts on those who are willing to pay a premium up front for their gear and is clearly succeeding, even in the current economic dip. So it would stand to reason for criminals to go after that market segment more vigorously, but that doesn’t seem to happen, at the contrary.

Malware is profitable in its ability to mass attack through spam or DDOS or other mechanisms. As far as malware authors go, the profit is in finding the most machines that can be hit with a single tool.

Frinstance: Conficker variations are still spreading, even though any Windows machines that has been patched in the last 8 months is immune. Maybe 10% of the Windows machines out there are vulnerable. It is not worth creating a similar robot for Mac because 10% of its 10% would cost as much to try to infect as 10% of the 90% Windows share.

As far as I know I have never encountered any of them, lots of phishing scams though. And I believe none of those 30 are viruses.

Also, OSX’s 10% market share is where most of the money is. So one would expect a more than proportional interest on the part of malware authors for that segment.

I forgot to mention that the Windows 7 ad seems to imply that a 4 or 5 year old child who can barely read can easily create a multimedia work of art.

My younger son, who is 12 years old, has been using linux since he was seven and is now started learning on his own how to develop PSP games under linux. He took the computer literacy class at school and found the computer class now consists of teaching children how to use Microsoft software. The last thing the class did was to create two slideshow multimedia presentations with Movie Maker. One was done with family photos and the other was done with photos taken in Russia. I ask him why he didn’t use one of the Ljube (a Russian band) songs from my cd collection, and he said he didn’t think of it.

Windows originated as a graphic shell that sat on top of MS_DOS, which was never designed with networking in mind and as such relied on a simplistic security model that is easily circumvented. On of the most ridiculously simple MS-DOS was the ANSI bomb which used a specially coded data file to re-map some or all of the keys on the keyboard to send a format c: command instead of the actual key value.
Windows versions up through 98 were all GUI shells that used MS-DOS for file management and even with version 3.1.1 which added networking, still used the underlying MS-Dos file system.
Windows NT however was built around a kernel developed under contract by the team that created RSTS-E for digital equipment corporation as an OS for the PDP 11/70 mini computer. RSTS-E had some serious flaws in handling ungraceful program exits, often saving workspace images to the wrong user account. NT had the same problems.
NT incorporated the multitasking functions into the kernel, and revamped the file system to be more compatible with multitasking, multi-user security, but used access control lists (ACLs) extensively and corruption of an ACL could either make a file inaccessible by anyone, or accessible to everyone.
Another problem with NT was in the extensive use of remote procedure calls (RPCs) to local library functions. RPCs make it very easy to elevate the calling program to administrative rights. Many Windows wxploits work by using an RPC to invoke an instance of a system service, the passing system commands as out-of-band data.

So in short, it is easy to write malware for Windows.

Apple, however, was not quick to adopt multiuser/multitasking into MacOS, Multasking abilities were added around version 8 with the multifinder and multiuser capabilities were added with an upgrade to the filesystem. Also the functionality if the kernel in pre OSX versions of Macos was much more inclusive that the Windows NT kernel, allowing for very simple hardware divers and applications, since most software consisted mainly of local procedure calls.

The also Allowed software that followed Apples interface standards to be portable between different versions of the OS. It also made it difficult for malware to work across different versions as the malware did not follow the published API standards. So each version of MacOS before OSX generally had fewer than 100 malware programs written for it. As I recall, MacOS 9 has something like 2 dozen viruses.

By contrast, most Windows malware are work programs written as Visual Basic for Applications macros in MS office files, and rely on the seamless integration of the Microsoft applications for dissemination.

Since OSX, Apple has been using a kernel derived from BSD-UNIX, however there are at least 30 pieces of OSX malware with Macs at nearly 10 percent market share.

Linux is under represented in the market share calculation since market share counts only include known deployments of commercial Linux distributions. No one really knows how many systems are really running linux with non-commercial installations, and embedded Linux installations on consumer devices such as the Sony e-book reader and the Archos PMP devices are not counted as they are locked down and usually do not support software installation.

However the security model used by Linux is quite simple, but effective. System services are not run with administrative privilege, but as non-privileged users.
Basically, Linux is a malware hostile environment. While this doesn’t prevent the development of linux malware, it reduces the damage that can be caused by malware, and makes it more difficult to create the malware in the first place.

And as Lao Tzu well knew, penetrator technology always outstrips defenses. Any usable interface will necessarily have chinks in its armor.

And Mac users know as many irritations from their GUI as those of us who are stuck with Lose-dohs. Remember this video?

I do use and promote FireFox and OpenOffice.