I agree it is kind of sleazy of Sophos. Nonetheless, you are the one who was saying, “number of OSX viruses, worms, and involuntary spam bots is still ZERO.” Will you admit there are at least a few?
Nope. Those are Windows malware and two Trojan horse applications that will run on a Mac. They are NOT "OSX viruses, worms and involuntary spambots". A Trojan horse is merely an application that does something other than what it claims to do... and requires the user install it like any other application. My statement is absolutely true. Just because an anti-virus application can identify WINDOWS malware coming into a Mac, it does not make that Mac vulnerable TO that Malware unless that Mac is running Windows!
As I told you, there are 18 known Trojans in five distinct families (means of attack) in the wild for OSX. OSX identifies and warns the user about all of them if the user attempts to download, install, or run any of them. The user is given three distinct warnings and is required to submit three distinct administrator permissions with name and password for each of those steps to over ride those warnings... it really takes industrial strength stupidity to get infected with a Trojan on a Mac. Sophos’ AV intervened in the download step so that their software could report it found those Trojans. It allowed the Trojan downloads to occur! I think it’s better to prevent the download in the first place, as soon as OSX recognizes the signature.