08 Marketshare is irrelevant

Some people say that Macs don’t have viruses because they’re a tiny part of the market. To an extent, this is probably true. If you’re writing some malware - especially as part of a for-profit botnet or spam farm - or you are looking to make a name for yourself, you want to infect the largest number of computers possible.

However, many malware developers thrive for visibility, and what’s more compelling: writing the 147,281st virus for Windows, or writing the first and only killer virus for the Mac? Someone out there wants to give the smug “Hello, I’m a Mac” guy a good spanking.

09 There’s big money in malware

Much malware today is being used for one of two purposes: either grabbing information from your computer (collecting usernames and passwords to your bank as you type them, for example), or creating huge botnets of thousands (or tens of thousands) of computers to generate spam and serve up denial-of-service attacks on various

websites. There’s big money in both of these, and they’re not being run by amateurs. And when it makes economic sense to target the Apple faithful, Macs are next on the list.

10 Mac anti-virus companies?

I’m split on this issue. One the one hand, you’re spending hard-earned money on software to protect yourself against, effectively, nothing. However, on the other hand, you get two benefits: (a) you can avoid passing Windows viruses from one hapless Windows user to the next, and (b) when the killer Mac virus does appear, you’ll have the engine in place to quickly stop it in its tracks, assuming your virus definitions are up to date and they’ve released a fix.

And as for me? Winging it without any anti-virus software, but making daily backups just in case.