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Thread: MAC OSX Tops Malware Table!

  1. #1
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    MAC OSX Tops Malware Table!

    OK, this almost belongs in tech humour, but it is "true" (talk about "lies, damn lies, and statistics")

    MAC OSX malware increased by 1,550% as opposed to 36% for Windows.

    Just take a look here:

    http://www.snpx.com/cgi-bin/news55.c...76224it?-15667

    Unfortunately we are looking at periodic, or "year on year" type comparisons. In absolute terms OSX had 35 instances, and Windows over a quarter of a million.

  2. #2
    Senior Member isildur's Avatar
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    Gee whiz, quite a headline until you see the real numbers. I think everyone expected an increase as the OS gained a larger market share, but when you start with 2 any percentage increase it going to sound big. I bet Redmond would like to see just that headline copied through out the other media.
    Only trust Pipe-smoking Penguins.

  3. #3
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    Haha I figured there was a twist

  4. #4
    Security reports that state percentages in their headline arent even worth the paper they are invariable not printed on.

    What you really need to see is the figures for the different OSs and even more importantly the numbers as they refer to variants.
    A piece of malware, be it a virus, worm, trojan, etc, can have tens, hundreds, even thousands of variants (slight deviations of the code) and any anti-virus product worth its salt should have a way of detecting these variants using a single identity (or pattern file, depending on how the anti-virus company refers to them). So knowing that 5000 new viruses were seen on this OS, isnt actually as useful to know as the fact that actually 5 distinct viruses were discovered on this OS which actually counted for 5000 different variants.

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