UPDATED: Symantec researchers issues first Mac botnet malware warning

9 to 5 Mac ^ | 10/1/2009 | Jonny Evans

[Swordmaker]

But if a government was using Mac OS X at that point they would be vulnerable.

By the way, The US Army is using Mac OS X for their website:

http://www.army.mil/

and is deploying more for security reasons because it would make them more secure.

[for-q-clinton]

You miss the point again. The reason why it wasn’t exploited is because the install base isn’t large enough.

If Mac OS X was a large install base it would have been exploited because you could be guaranteed that some users wouldn’t have patched the original bug.

This is how most windows viruses spread (and Linux too). Unpatched machines. Some users/administrators are just too stupid to patch a box. So when you take in the limited amount of Mac OS X users and the fact that there are different versions the viable attack vector is very small. You’d have to find someone that has the specific build you want to attack...and in this case the bug was in the first version of Mac OS X. So you’d have to find someone who bought a Mac with the original version and didn’t patch it right away. Using today’s number of usres of Mac OS X users isn’t reality of what was in place at the time of the bug.

I’m sure Microsoft would love to just say everyone was on Windows 7 the day it launchd but that’s not reality. So how many of those Mac OS X boxes with the bug were actually on a LAN during the time of it being unpatched? Give me that number and you’ll see why it was never exploited.