Thanks for backing me up on that. Yes, 6.6% is nobody. Attacking 93.4% gets noticed.
Right, sure.
A scientific survey commissioned by Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, found that 14% of personal computer users use Macintoshes... and that comports well with the 25,000,000 that Newsweek reported this Spring... before two quarters of Mac growing Mac sales of over 1.25 million per quarter...
But I am sure you are convinced that 25,000,000 "nobodies" is nothing as well.
Think about this: In the world of murderers, thousands of murderers who rob the local and ubiquitous convenience market and kill the clerk go unnoticed except statistically. The murderers who are remembered are those who knock off the most protected people in the world...The theory that hackers are not in it for the infamy ignores the fact that almost all of the hackers who have been caught were caught because the BRAGGED to someone about it! The hacker who brings down the vaunted Mac OSX and its industrial strength UNIX under pinnings with a self-propagating virus would gain lots of bragging rights.
Stick with your preferred platform with its more than 80,000 known viruses and thousands of spyware and adware exploits... surely 180,000,000 Windows users can't be wrong... as they download the latest anit-this and anti-that definitions so they can feel marginally safe... all while ignoring a platform that has ZERO viruses, ZERO worms, ZERO spyware, and ZERO adware.
Enjoy your experience as a sheep.
You're half right.
Why waste time attacking a difficult to crack 5 or 6% when there's an easy to crack 90% out there?
It's not just the popularity of windows, it's that it's so much less secure the the other operating systems, and a wide base of, let's say "entry level" users makes it more likely your worm or virus will take hold.
There are over 100,000 Windows viruses, we get about 10,000 new viruses per year, and only a couple of them get noticed. The chances for getting noticed are slim to none.
However, write a successful Mac virus and you will get noticed.
The following is a post I put together to illustrate that obscurity doesn't help you if someone wants to make you a target:
Oh, I don't know. Perhaps as someone else already said on this thread, it might be done for the bragging rights of having created the first successful virus/worm to attack Macs.
I've seen this charge that the small market share that Mac and Linux have is what keeps them safe. It is repeated often enough and seems reasonable enough until you actually look at the history of some other worms/viruses.
Consider: the spread of the Witty Worm.
Quoth the poster:
Witty infected only about a tenth as many hosts than the next smallest widespread Internet worm. Where SQL Slammer infected between 75,000 and 100,000 computers, the vulnerable population of the Witty worm was only about 12,000 computers. Although researchers have long predicted that a fast-probing worm could infect a small population very quickly, Witty is the first worm to demonstrate this capability. While Witty took 30 minutes longer than SQL Slammer to infect its vulnerable population, both worms spread far faster than human intervention could stop them. In the past, users of software that is not ubiquitously deployed have considered themselves relatively safe from most network-based pathogens. Witty demonstrates that a remotely accessible bug in any minimally popular piece of software can be successfully exploited by an automated attack.
I suspect there are more than 12,000 Linux and/or Mac hosts out there on the internet.
Also, consider that the folks who were hit with this were also among the more security-concious users:
The vulnerable host population pool for the Witty worm was quite different from that of previous virulent worms. Previous worms have lagged several weeks behind publication of details about the remote-exploit bug, and large portions of the victim populations appeared to not know what software was running on their machines, let alone take steps to make sure that software was up to date with security patches. In contrast, the Witty worm infected a population of hosts that were proactive about security -- they were running firewall software. The Witty worm also started to spread the day after information about the exploit and the software upgrades to fix the bug were available.
Show me a successful worm/virus against Macs and I'll listen. Until then, your talking point is FUD.
Perhaps this is why the US Army moved army.mil over to OSX - they figured hackers wouldn't care enough to hack it if it was moved onto Apple equipment...