ZDNet: Why Mac users are safer

The evidence is overwhelming: The opportunities to attack Mac users are plentiful, but nobody bothers. It's still too easy to get at Windows users. This has been obvious for some time and well-understood in the security community.

By Larry Seltzer
January 2, 2014

On October 22 of 2013 Apple released OS X 10.9, a.k.a. Mavericks. In it they patched dozens of security vulnerabilities, many quite serious, and disclosed those fixes. In contrast to their prior practice, they did not, and have not since, released fixes for those vulnerabilities for earlier versions of OS X, including 10.8, a.k.a. Mountain Lion. I think they're not going to.

For the more than 10 weeks since, all Mountain Lion (and Lion and earlier) users have been vulnerable to attack. Have you heard any reports of attacks? I haven't. There may in fact be some, but they're certainly not widespread. (By way of analogy, the NSA may be compromising iPhones, but it's not a widespread problem.)

And that's the issue right there: No Mac problems can really be all that widespread because there aren't enough of them.

Click the URL above to read the full article