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Comment by morganpyne | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, I'm just curious why we haven't seen much real malware yet. The Mac Defender stuff is a joke, but there's no reason why somebody couldn't be exploiting the recent Skype bug (http://www.purehacking.com/blogs/gordon-maddern/skype-0day-v...), or the Chrome/Flash bug (http://www.vupen.com/demos/VUPEN_Pwning_Chrome.php), the bugs found at pwn2own or the myriad other holes which are closed regularly via updates.

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The reason is scale and alternative options: If you're a hacker, why focus on the Mac when you can target 10x as many people on Windows?

I have often seen this mantra repeated, but I can't believe that this is enough to dissuade every single hacker. With Macs approaching 10% of the market this has got to be worth somebodies time to have a go. And yet, I know a lot of folks with Macs and not a single one has ever had malware issues. Either nobody is getting hit, or they are getting hit with stuff so good and stealthy that they just don't know it :-) I'm certainly not arguing that Macs are invulnerable (far from it), I'm just genuinely curious why somebody somewhere isn't stepping in to fill the malware niche.

Malware might bring money in, but that doesn't make it a business. You can't exactly corner the market or rely on word of mouth; your targets are largely random and diverse. When you have a random choice, the only rational decision is to pick the most likely option: Windows.

> With Macs approaching 10% of the market this has got to be worth somebodies time to have a go.

Well, apparently there is an issue. Enough so that Apple has taken notice.

Yeah, I'm surprised if no hacker just wants to penetrate the Mac to be able to claim victory, like "Steve Jobs, you thought macs couldn't get viruses. Let me prove you wrong"... or something like that?

Don't people like Charlie Miller do just that?

Of course, there aren't in it for the profit, where the only rational thing to do is to target Windows.

Because the users are more naive about malware and 10x as many might actually install it?

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