Not sure if a poorly written driver is a HOAX? Windows suffers from 3rd party drivers all the time and gets a black eye from it.
One could argue the OS shouldn't allow such things.
One could argue that the OS shouldn't allow third party programs to run which is what a driver is.
It was a hoax because they did not reveal that to make the Mac insecure, they had to bring in ringers... a third party WiFi card and drivers for it... when the Mac had a perfectly secure (well, not exactly, more on that in a moment) WiFi circuitry and drivers already installed that were NOT susceptible to their shenanigans. It was a hoax also because the prepared the Mac to accept the attack by installing a script they could invoke to elevate their privileges and start a terminal session. They opened the ports they needed for their invasion to work. None of this exists on a default Mac.
Maynor and Ellch also claimed they had provided Apple with the specifics of the security flaw... but Apple said they had not! Maynor and Ellch were not forthcoming with any answers when critics of their Hoax started pointing out the inconsistencies.
I agree that Windows suffers from 3rd party drivers... but for a "security specialist", which is what one of the hoaxers is, to deliberately install a compromised driver and then pretend it is the default condition is fraud.
OS X does have flaws... but they are aggressively sought and and fixed. As I said above, the Mac's default driver was not exactly secure. The FUD hoax caused Apple to go through their drivers with a fine tooth comb. They found three unrelated flaws that would crash the WiFi card driver in older model Macs that used the original Airport card. Apparently the flaws had already been fixed in the rewriting of the drivers for the upgraded cards now being shipped but had not been retroactively fixed in older machines. They issued a software update that fixed it.