Not one virus, trojan horse, adware, spyware and almost zero pop-up ads.
Uh huh!
And the last two days at my Windows-only company, about half of our PC's have been down with a nasty trojan horse. This with a professional IT staff, firewalls, virus software, etc. Gotta love Windows!
There is no operating system that is 100% secure, but Windows tends to make exploiting it far too easy.
Exploiting weaknesses in modern UNIX systems, like Mac OS X, is a task for hacker elites. Teenagers with basic scripting skills need not apply.
So, generally - Macs are more difficult to exploit through a network. And it isn't a difficulty born of obscurity. It is a result of the UNIX underpinnings that severely limit programs based on their permissions. This of course means the primary means by which Macs are vulnerable to malicious code is when the user is duped into running the software, and even then - the operating system will ask for admin authentication if the program in question tried to do anything out of the ordinary.
Oh please. It's the same comparison windows/mac windows/linux and IE/Firefox.
When everything is said and done, year by year windows/IE has the most critical flaws.(and in most cases, the most total flaws)
That is a recap of ALL the minor to serious OS X (and its underlying UNIX components and applications) security flaws, not holes, that were patched to date in 2005... it is not current.