I try to distance myself from the whole Mac versus PC debate. They are both extremely capable and wonderful machines, and I’ve spent enough time owning and working with both to know they each have their strengths and weaknesses. But you know that misconception people have about Macs being somehow immune to viruses and malware? That bothers me. Because when viruses do hit Macs on a large scale, those same people are totally unprepared.
Today, Dr. Web malware analyst Sorokin Ivan posted to Twitter that a particular identity-stealing trojan had infected some 600,000 Macintosh computers in North America. Not that PCs are any safer from viruses, but many Mac users don’t take the necessary precautions to protect themselves as PC users do. The sooner we all understand that no platform is immune to malicious code, the safer your identity and our collective computing experiences will be.
Meanwhile, if you suspect your Mac has been infected, you can find more details here and information on identification and removal here.
Yeah, just a couple days ago, I was in a local Best Buy (hate that place, but they had a gift my kid wanted for her birthday) and overheard a couple talking to a salesman in the computer dept. He was showing them PC desktops when they asked about the Mac. He took them over to their Mac section, explaining as he walked that the “big reason people buy the Macs is because they can’t get viruses”.
I realize this misinformation is usually spread just because it’s over-simplification on the part of some salesperson, who probably imagines it’ll be over the customer’s head to get into an explanation of the details. But it does need to be squashed…. ANY computer system can potentially get a virus infection. If it couldn’t, it’d be a pathetic excuse for a computer that lacked sufficient capability in its instruction set that gave it that status!
What do the figures on the map indicate?