The sky is falling: Hackers targeting Macs?

"We should fight the virii there so they don't hit us at home!" -- G.W. Symantec.

Virus writers working for organized crime. What's next, virus writers working for legitimate businesses to help drum up business or quash the competition? NAHHHH, that'll never happen!

Honestly, I don't care about Apple's market share in relationship to viruses/hacks/malware, since Apple has a strong showing in the education fields. I mean, c'mon, when I was in college, which had an all PC computer lab, the end of every semester, when all the papers were due, was marked by somebody dumping a virus onto a lab computer and, before you knew it, 60% of the computers on campus were trashed. You mean to tell me that a hacker going to an all Apple school hasn't tried to do something sinister to his/her school's computer system just because they're Macs? C'mon. I'll concede that OSX probably does have some holes in it, but they're not the drive-your-Mack-truck-though-them holes that Windows has; they would've been found and exploited by now, small market share be damned.

Yeah... anybody remember the so-called "Palm" virius? At the height of the PDA boom, Symmantic released a Palm virius scanner. The only Palm virius I remember is some emulator that erased your Palm if you pirated it.

Not to say it's not possible, but I hesitate to trust Symmantic.

I'm not usually distrusting, but these kind of things always smell fishy. Don't (blindly) trust "studies" that find Microsoft products to be X% safer or X% more cost effective than Linux apps if the study is funded by Microsoft. Likewise, don't (blindly) trust studies that say virus writers are targeting your system if the study was funded (or conducted) by a company that makes anti-virus software. There's clearly an inherent bias in stories such as this - so, take with a liberal dose of salt.

MacNewsWorld.com is apparently not even 2 years old and this is the first I've ever heard of them. In my opinion, the only reason they're writing doom and gloom articles is cause they have young inexperienced writers trying to gain notice from sites who will link to them and siphon their traffic.

Yeah, a company that makes anti-virus software is telling me that I may be susceptible to viruses. Symantec has been pulling this for a while now.

Fishes,
narco.