Regarding Norton antivirus software, which I have used in the past, I usually found that a virus infection was preferable.
There are approximately 22,000,000 Mac users out there.
Last quarter, Apple Mac computer sales were between 5.8% and 6.1% (depending on which report you accept) of all computers sold in the United States.
If it were so easy for the authors of malware to create malware for the Mac, they would have done so by now.
If we merely accept the lower 5.8% reported as market share (ignoring the other reports that show that actual Mac installed user base may be as high as 18% of users - i.e. 18% of all software sold is Mac software according to the Software and Information Industry Association) then one would expect that 5.8% of the over 200,000 (McAfee's number) computer malware, or about 11,600, would be found on Macintoshes. The actual number is ZERO.
OS X - Six years with no malware in the wild and still counting.
Incidentally, Norton got started on pre-OSX Macs. It was a pretty good app back then.
I'm sorry, but this is just a tired old canard that really doesn't stand up to scrutiny, yet we see it here on every thread.
So, to make things easier, here's a post that addresses it. It is largely addressing the 'firefox isn't popular enough to get attacked by malware' FUD, but it applies here as well.
Yeah, that is something the Microsoft bashers don't realize. If 90% of us used Linux or Apples, then 90% of the viruses and spyware would be made for those systems.
What most Microsoft defenders don't realize is that the above is complete and total hogwash.
Firefox now has 10% of browser market share. While 10% may not sound like much it represents a huge number of users when you consider the total number of folks on the net. That also doesn't take into consideration that many people fake their browser responses to make it seem as though they are using IE so stupid websites that require IE for no legitimate reason will work.
Let's take one case in point to show how bogus the concept of "too few users to matter" really is. There are people out there who will write viruses to muck things up just because they can.
From the friendly article:
On Friday March 19, 2004 at approximately 8:45pm PST, an Internet worm began to spread, targeting a buffer overflow vulnerability in several Internet Security Systems (ISS) products, including ISS RealSecure Network, RealSecure Server Sensor, RealSecure Desktop, and BlackICE. The worm takes advantage of a security flaw in these firewall applications that was discovered earlier this month by eEye Digital Security. Once the Witty worm infects a computer, it deletes a randomly chosen section of the hard drive, over time rendering the machine unusable. The worm's payload contained the phrase "(^.^) insert witty message here (^.^)" so it came to be known as the Witty worm.
...
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.
Note in the above that the entire population of vulnerable computers was just 12,000, an insignificant number of hosts when you consider how many devices are on the internet.
The Victims:
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.
O.k., so you have a small pool of vulnerable hosts, and the users at least have the presense of mind to be running a firewall, yet someone took the time to craft and deploy this worm.
Are you sure you still want to claim that there just aren't enough Linux or OSX users out there to make it a tempting target?
That's not even taking psychology into account. There are groups out there who do this kind of thing for fun (and sometimes profit). The bragging rights to having created the first successful OSX worm should be tempting enough if it were as easy a target as MS-Windows apparently is.