I remember there was a competition back in the days like one of the pwn2pwn contests, it was a Mac desktop vs. Windows desktop, both run of the mill machines with latest operating systems and updates for each.
Two teams were trying to hack each one
The Mac was hacked in 8 minutes
The windows machine was hacked in by end of day
You would have thought it would have been the other way around. The Mac wasn’t more secure, it just wasn’t worth hacking into since they were such a minority of devices on the Internet. Security by obscurity wasn’t really security...
Re: Windows... I watched one of our IT guys break into a secure Windows machine and become admin in under a minute. Yes, he had physical access to the machine - the console keyboard monitor & mouse - he wasn't limited to mere remote access.
“The Mac was hacked in 8 minutes
The windows machine was hacked in by end of day”
-The hacks are prepared as far out as a year in advance, and only the execution took place in 8 minutes. It may (or may not) have been much longer figuring out how to exploit the Mac, but faster to execute once the problem was solved.
-Apple’s past boastfulness has placed them as the premium/priority targets as these events.
-BSD Unix which is the basis for MacOS actually is a much more secure foundation than windows, but Windows has improved a lot over the years, and Apple has grown kind of lax about security over time. Apple is kind of like the fictionalized Maytag repairman character, he had to do so little for so many years, that he’d probably be useless when something actually breaks.