All of us online have had a great decade shouting at Microsoft about virus problems. Smug owners of Macs have told us that it's all our own fault for not adopting the superior technology. However, now that Apple is becoming a substantial part of the computing ecosystem we're also beginning to see that it's not so much the technology as the popularity that matters:
Apple customers are more at risk from malware now because of their misconception that their iDevices and Macs are secure and because of Apple's poor attitude to security, according to experts.
It gets worse too:
Eugene Kaspersky, founder and CEO at the Lab, told Computer Business Review last week and confirmed to The Reg that Apple was about ten years behind Microsoft in terms of security.
Kaspersky Lab thinks that this is just the start of the attacks that the fruity firm can expect now that Macs have become so much more popular.
"For many years I've been saying that from a security point of view there is no big difference between Mac and Windows," he said.
"Cyber criminals have now recognised that Mac is an interesting area. Now we have more, it's not just Flashback or Flashfake. Welcome to Microsoft's world, Mac. It's full of malware."
The relative immunity of Macs to virus infections in the past wasn't so much to do with the inherent safety of the operating system. Rather, it was due to their rarity in the entire ecosystem.
Given that we've adopted the entire language of virus infection from biology, we can run this back the other way too. For vaccination to work in human beings, against measles or rubella for example, we don't need vaccination rates to be 100%. 90-95% usually does it, those remaining not vaccinated protected by what we call herd immunity. There just aren't enough people who could be infected to support an outbreak of the disease.
The comparison isn't exact, for trojans and computer viruses are deliberately created, not randomly, but when Macs were, as they have been, some 3 or 4% of the entire computing ecosystem we just didn't get viruses or trojans written for that operating system. It just wasn't worth it: not unless your aim was to crash the global graphics design industry.
With Cupertino now pumping out tens of millions of devices a quarter this rarity in the environment is changing. Which means that there will inevitably be an increase in viruses, bots, trojans and so on aimed at iOS running systems. We'll end up seeing whether iOS really is better than Windows in this regard and I most assuredly have my doubts. As do the experts in the field.
For as they say, it wasn't better technology that kept the infections at bay but the simple rarity of the OS to be infected.
