I monitor these sorts of things and I thought I’d share it with all of you. To Mac users, this will come as no surprise but those of you bemoaning all your PC problems, this should be of at least some mild interest.
Macintosh Malware
A company known as F_Secure, who watches the computer malware scene as a big part of what they do, just released the latest statistics on Macintosh malware. No surprise that there was a grand total of ZERO, NADDA, ZILCH viruses OR worms for the Mac in 2011. There were 58 attempts at Trojan horses or backdoor attacks.
By the way, according to the article, there does not seem to be a correlation between the amount of malware for Mac and the Mac’s market share. I found that interesting. Up until now I always considered it as a reasonable but weak rebuttal by the Windows crowd.
Windows Malware
On the other side, Windows attacks are still growing at an alarming rate. Compared to 1.5 million malware variants for Windows in 2009 and slightly over a million in the first half of 2010 alone, 58 doesn’t seem so bad. In fact, as the article above puts it, it’s “almost negligibly minuscule.” It almost makes you wonder why Norton and the others even bother to write protection for us Mac folks, but I’m glad they do. There could have been 60!
Breakdown of Windows, Unix and Java malware
The card brands won’t let a little thing like Federal Legislation stand in the way of profit. If legislation takes it away on the grounds that it’s unfair, they just make it up somewhere else. 
