The problem is, if more windows users moved to mac, so would the bad guys.
That claim has never proved to be true. This canard has been claimed for the last two decades yet the results have not changed. The question must be asked is what is the tipping point of number of Macs in the wild, that will attract those bad guys to attack the Mac platform?
Recall, if you will, that every study shows that Mac users are wealthier than are Windows PC users and have more disposable assets at hand. It is also true that approximately 99% of all Macs and iOS devices are operating without any anti-virus or any third-party malware of any kind. That would make them sitting ducks. There are now approximately 1.4 BILLION of these devices out there, including approximately 100,000,000 Macs.
It takes only 2,000 Windows PCs aggregated together into a SpamBot for an uninterrupted period of two weeks to be economically valuable. Such a Spambot can be sold on the underground for upwards of $50,000 to blackout spammers for their nefarious emails. Yet the only reported MacBots in the wild, turned out to be hoaxes. . . promulgated by a Russian anti-virus company, DrWeb, intent on selling its Mac Antivirus wares for business who created a honey-pot claiming they were intercepting 600,000 "infected Macs" calling into another server for instructions. Mac users were told they could connect to DrWeb's honeypot and check their computer's UUID and see if they were "infected."
The so-called MacBot "infection" required the infected Mac also have JAVA installed to even get infected, and the users had to have connected to an obscure Russian language only gaming site to download character definitions for a game that only had under 20,000 users around the world. . . yet 96% of the supposed infected Macs were in the US or Canada, English speaking countries. The next problem was that those who found they were supposedly "infected" never found any malware on their computers and the UUIDs reported by the honey-pot included many Macs that had never had JAVA installed (its not a default install). Included many brand new Macs that had yet to be sold, and many that had the UUID assigned but were yet to even be manufactured! Ergo, it turned out that all DrWeb had was a random list of Mac UUIDs, not a list of infected anything. . . a HOAX! I had two of these members of the list, neither of which had JAVA installed.
The upshot was that not one single infected Mac member of the MacBot was ever found in the wild. . . and the numbers DrWeb was reporting as infected kept shrinking as people started reporting on discussion threads their "UUID" identified Macs were not infected at all. From the original 600,000 infected Macs it was dropped by a week to 270,000, then to 169,000, then to under 100,000, then to under 60,000, then it disappeared from the news entirely. The reports went from headlines to nothing in less than two weeks. . . and died with a whimper.
Two years later DrWeb tried the same tactic again by announcing they had found another MacBot. . . which coincided with their release, this time, of their new DrWeb Personal, for individuals. Again, not a single infected Mac was ever found in the wild, and only DrWeb ever claimed to find such an infection, which still used the same Trojan to supposedly infect a Mac.
We know from history of malware, that malware authors have written malware for vulnerable populations of fewer than 18,000 target machines. (One was written to infect a mere 80 vulnerable computers!) The Witty Worm is an prime example. When the Witty Worm was released into the Net, within 35 minutes, every single one of the BlackIce protected WindowsPCs that had not been updated to the latest version of the BlackIce software six months before, all 18,000 of them or so, was infected with the Witty Worm! That number of non-upgraded computers had just been publicized in an effort to get their owners to upgrade. . . and a few days later, the Witty Worm was released!
The point of all this is that if bad guys can make $50,000 for just infecting 2,000 computers that are protected by the full arsenal of anti-virus and malware that Windows users routinely deploy, WHY ARE THEY NOT TARGETING THE ONE HUNDRED MILLION BARE NAKED, SITTING DUCK APPLE MAC COMPUTERS if it were so damn easy, as you seem to think????
The OS X operating system on Macs has been in the wild since 1998, eighteen years, and its UNIX roots for 50 years. It has undergone a baptism of fire, being attacked in every way imaginable, Vic S.
To date, there have been exactly SEVEN computer virus candidates for OS X, all of which have failed for lack of a viable vector. There are 84 known Trojans in seven known families, all of which the operating system itself will WARN the user about if he or she attempts to download, install or run one. . . and this warning requires that user to input an administrators name and password to continue in their folly if they wish to continue, each step of the way before they can infect their machine. It takes INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH STUPID to get one of these trojans or even a new variant on a modern Mac through that gauntlet of requesters.
Perhaps Windows users ARE industrial strength stupid, and that is the reason they have gotten so many malware for that platform, but frankly I doubt it. I think Windows users are pretty smart. . . they've just been conned into thinking that Windows is as good as it gets.