"It does when you consider there aren't many, if any, viruses for OS X. The thing's been out for, what, six years?"
There aren't many viruses out there for unix based OS's of which Apple is one. And yes its been out for a while and still have a small fraction the number of users that Microsoft XP has.
"You'd think by now someone would've written a few just for the sake of saying it's possible."
They are out there, just not enough apple users to have them actually spread.
25 million machines running OS X isn't enough to tempt a virus writer to at least try? If you say so.
Yup. There is a mac anti-virus product out there called sophos or sofos.
Name one in the wild. Not a laboratory proof-of-concept with out a vector.
More Macs out there now than when they had over a hundred viruses in the wild. That kind of ruins the argument.
Sorry, but this is FUD. If the mechanisms were out there, it wouldn't take long at all to propagate a worm or virus across the millions of Macs and Linux boxes out there.
From a previous post of mine:
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.