I wrote an article for Scene Magazine about the virus problem.

It’s the single biggest cost to small business with computers connected to the Internet. We all know that.

I prefer the word “malware” to “virus”. The word “virus” tends to make people think that these are somehow naturally occurring. The truth is totally the opposite. A virus is a program just like any other. It just has evil intent. Viruses are very deliberate, they didn’t evolve, happen or spring up naturally, someone wrote them.

There’s many different terms; spyware, worm, trojan... They are all just terms for malicious software. That means programs with evil intent. Hence the term mal-ware.

The Mac has a better operating system and there are fewer holes. It doesn’t have Internet Explorer for starters and that is Windows biggest opening for malware attacks. The Mac is built on Unix which has been around for decades. It’s a much more hardened operating system that was built with security in mind from day one, security wasn’t added on later like it was for Windows.

But the biggest resistance (to malware) the Mac has comes from the fact that it is NOT Windows. Just like a biological virus for the sheep probably won’t infect my eucalyptus trees, so malware written for Windows won’t work on a Mac.

Is the Mac immune? - no it’s not. It’s just with a population of 500 million Windows computers, most of the malware is aimed there because it gets more targets.