[X Newbies] Apple and all of these viruses?

[Florin Alexander Neumann]

On Sunday, Aug 24, 2003, at 03:59 Canada/Eastern, Steven Rogers wrote:

>>> b) that "the Mac is too unimportant to write viruses for" doesn't 
>>> prove that the Mac is equally vulnerable to viruses as a PC.
>>
> Like I said in all my posts, its about the very common discussion that 
> everyone hears, not necessarily limited to what was posted on the > list.

You're probably seeing other discussions. In what I've seen, the 
statement "the Mac is too unimportant to write viruses for" is not 
presented as an argument to "prove that the Mac is equally vulnerable 
to viruses as [sic] a PC", but as an explanation for the phenomenon 
that Mac malware is far less common than Windows malware. That's what I 
said, and if you want to reply to what I said, fine, do so; if you want 
to reply to discussions on other lists, perhaps replying on those lists 
might be more productive; if you want to reply to what "everyone 
hears", then start a new thread and identify it as such.

> (B) was the thesis of the article referenced on the list via link - 
> that's why it came up.

If the link you mean is the one quoted by Eugene

http://www.bynkii.com/generic_mac_stuff/archives/000091.html

then you're simply wrong. The issue of there being far fewer Mac users 
than Windows users wasn't even mentioned by the author, nor does it 
appear in the previously mentioned article in this thread. Both 
articles deal with whether or not it's easier to write malware for 
Windows than for OS X or Unix. I'm not competent to comment on that; 
moreover, as Randy pointed out, this is not the place for such a 
discussion.

> If you don't like the thread, take the time to post a good rebuttal or 
> just quit replying and let it die.

If I didn't like the thread, or didn't think it worthwhile, I'd simply 
ignore it. Whether my rebuttal was good or not, I'm not in a position 
to say, but what I can say is that you just pretended it didn't exist.

Let's say that was just a momentary aberration. I'll assume you are an 
adult and we can have a conversation based on mutual respect. Here's 
what I state: The reason that there are far more viruses on Windows 
than on Mac is that Windows has a far higher share of the market than 
Mac. Whether the Mac is or is not more secure than Windows is 
immaterial.

The problem can be conceptualized (at a newbie level, without jargon or 
reference to programming arcana) as follows.

Say the measure for security is the ratio of successful viruses to all 
viruses, where a successful virus is one that does what it was designed 
to do, and an unsuccessful virus is one that is blocked by the system's 
security features. Say this measure is 10% for Windows, and say Mac and 
Win are equally secure.

Now let's attempt to reproduce the real world. Say we have 100 Windows 
users writing viruses, and 5 Mac users writing viruses; all are equally 
good and have mastered equally programming techniques on their 
respective platforms. What will happen? For the Windows sample, we can 
say with a high degree of confidence that there will be around 10 
infectious viruses. What about Mac? The sample is small, so randomness 
will play a great part. But there's a good chance there won't be any 
virus; a rather lower probability that there will be 1 virus; and a 
vanishingly small chance that there will be more than 1 virus.

Let's increase the Mac sample to 20. What now? Well, randomness will 
still play a part, but now we can be fairly confident that there will 
be at least 1 virus; there's a decent chance there will be 2 viruses, 
and quite a small chance that there will be more than 2 viruses.

In other words, this Gedankenexperiment shows that, when the 
disproportion between Win and Mac users is similar to that in the real 
world, whether one platform is more secure than the other is not an 
issue. Everything is sufficiently explained by the size of the sample. 
Which -- not coincidentally -- is precisely the conclusion one reaches 
by applying Occam's Razor to the issue.

f