Malware and Market Size

Ian Betteridge:

They simply refuse to believe the “security through obscurity” line which states that the Macs low market share helps it safe.  This is largely because they have an outdated view of what malware is produced for - they simply don’t understand that a lot of malware is produced not for kudos but for profit, and when you’re going for profit it makes more sense to hit the biggest possible market (i.e. Windows).

There’s no doubt this is partly true. If you could somehow prove that Mac OS X and Windows were, in fact, equally “secure” from a technical standpoint, Windows would still suffer from more malware because of its dominating market share.

But, and I’ve argued this before, it doesn’t explain why the Mac has, effectively, none. If it’s true that malware developers who want to make money will only write software for the vastly larger Windows market, then why doesn’t the same logic apply to non-malware commercial developers? There are two halls full of commercial Mac developers here at Macworld Expo. I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s not just Windows’s massive market share advantage.

★ Friday, 18 January 2008