Although “I was tethered to the World Wide Web, I was spared this ordeal. What saved me? These worms have no appetite for Macs, especially those running the latest operating system, OS X. And, it seems, I’m among the few here who uses a Mac,” writes Charles Haddad for BusinessWeek.
“And herein lies an irony. In bemoaning the Mac’s puny market share, the Wintel crowd misses the growing advantage of being small. Neither the disgruntled nor the crusader wants to bother attacking a computer that represents only 3% of worldwide PC sales. You see, going after such a small target won’t earn you front-page headlines,” Haddad misreports, parroting the “3% market share myth” yet again. See Syracuse Post-Standard: 3 percent is a false stat; Mac holds ’10 to 12 percent of the market for personal computers’ for an explanation of the myth. Haddad also insinuates that Mac OS X would be as porous as Windows if only Macs sat on 85% of the world’s desktops. This is just plain wrong, Charles. See: “Virus and worm problems not just due to market share; Windows inherently insecure vs. Mac OS X” and “Shattering the Mac OS X ‘security through obscurity’ myth”
Haddad continues, “That’s not to say that Macs are immune to attacks, but they’re as safe as you can get today. I’ve known only a handful of cases in which Macs or Mac networks were infected. Personally, I’ve yet to suffer an attack in 10 years of using e-mail and surfing the Web on various Macs. And I’ve lived dangerously, even disabling my virus protection while downloading files from unknown users off the Net. No savvy PC user would dare such a foolish thing. Today, my PC friends and co-workers live in constant fear of virus and worm attacks. It has greatly dampened their once torrid love affair with e-mail and the Internet.”
The full flawed and disappointing (even more so, coming from Haddad) article: “The Big Advantage in Being Small.”