I think what gets overlooked most of the time is that the reason Windows has been so targeted for years is because it is the most common OS being used. Of course hackers are going to target the system used by most of the public and businesses. As a side note, this has given Microsoft years of experience fixing and improving their security. Now that Macs are becoming more ‘common’ in the market place, they are getting more ‘attention’ from hackers, which is beginning to expose the security flaws in their software.
OS X has been getting attention for years. Nothing effective in the wild yet. Why would hackers bother to exploit software with a vulnerable population of 12,000, yet ignore 50+ million Mac users? That's a lot of machines out there, waiting to become a rather large botnet if they are that insecure.
“I think what gets overlooked most of the time is that the reason Windows has been so targeted for years is because it is the most common OS being used.”
Some people overlook it, some people put too much stock into it.
Operating Systems (and note that this article is about vendors of software not the OS itself) are like any other complex engineered product.
If everyone in the world drove a Yugo except 5% that drove a Humvee would the lower body count in Humvees be due to the number or the engineering? or, likely, Both.
There have been viruses produced for cell phones that have a user base of less than 200K people. Also the Base of OSX is BSD which happens to run the DNS servers the make the web work (not Apples Darwin BSD but a BSD variant) so hacking *1* particular BSD server could be the mother of all hijacks.
My old TRS-80 never had a virus nor antivirus software. It must have been even more secure than the Mac!