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need to send this to my sister, a Mac worshiper, who believes that Macs have “never” had a virus.

So I jump ship in Hong Kong and I make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course over in the Himalayas..and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself.And I say, “Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know.” And he says, “Oh, uh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.” So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

need to send this to my sister, a Mac worshiper, who believes that Macs have “never” had a virus.

She is right. They haven't. In the past dozen years that OSX has been in the wild, there have been seven attempts at building a self-replicating, self-transmitting, self-installing computer virus that would spread in Apple OSX Macs. All have failed.

There are approximately 28 known Trojan horse applications in five easily identified families that the OS will protect the user from downloading, installing, or running. At worst, this "malware" would be one of those "trojans," based on a now patched vulnerability in Java that affected OSX based Macs released before 2008. . . that had Java installed as a default. Apple stopped shipping Java installed as a default install two OSX revisions ago. . . limiting the damage it could do IF it got installed by a user. But that's not the least of it.

This "massive infection of 800,000 Macs never existed. . . there was a Java exploit, yes, but to get this thing you had to download some obscure charter definition files from a limited number of Eastern Russian role playing gaming sites. How many Mac users play that type of role playing game? Strangely, almost ALL, 95%, of the claimed infected Macs were in the US!??? But they had to connect to, and download a Trojan from an obscure Russian game site??? 800,000 of them??? Really? This was all based on a single source news story from a Russian anti-virus vendor who, TADA, had an anti-virus solution to sell to remove said malware. AND, he had intercepted these 800,000 Macs all calling home with a honeypot server that had recorded the UUIDs of the infected Macs!!!

This vendor set up a database that Mac users could submit their Mac UUIDs to and quickly learn if their Mac was infected and know if it was a member of the "massive Macbot" the malware author had built with their machine and 800,000 other infected Macs. But when the honeypot database started showing brand new Macs coming right off the assembly line, MACS WITHOUT JAVA INSTALLED, Macs which had never, ever been connected to the internet and were already listed with their Unique UUIDs as being "members of the massive 800,000 member MacBot," it became pretty obvious to us Mac users—who were looking for infected Macs and not finding them, just lots of users applying the easily applied removal tools to their Macs and NOT FINDING ANYTHING at all and reporting that negative fact—that it was a hoax designed to sell anti-virus wares. Hell, MY Mac's UUID was listed... as had two brand new machines at my office that had never had Java installed! There was no way they could even RUN the malware! Ergo, fraud, my friend. That did not get reported anywhere nearly as widely as the hyperbole of the massive MacBot did.