Leader: Are Macs really more secure?

A call from one antivirus vendor this week, encouraging users to ditch Windows PCs in favour of supposedly 'more secure' Macs, is a little at odds with perceived wisdom in the industry.

Nobody doubts Mac users fall victim to fewer attacks - let's take that as a given - but advising such a mass exodus, many believe, will undermine the very reason why Macs are perceived to be 'more secure': because they are less popular.

So while Sophos this week has been saying 'go Mac', certainly Symantec, another larger player in the industry which would normally not pass up a chance to slam Microsoft, admits the disparity is largely down to the size of the target.

In the past, John Thompson, CEO of Symantec, has likened virus writers and hackers to graffiti artists in the real world, and he likened Microsoft to the Tube train that goes through the centre of the city - everybody will see their work because everybody rides that train.

Why therefore would anybody turn their cyber spray cans on Apple, he argued, when relatively few people will see their work?

Thompson, speaking to silicon.com earlier this year, echoed his belief that Apple is more secure because it represents a smaller target. Or another analogy, if you can tolerate it - it's like telling people to move out of the cities and into the countryside because the countryside has less traffic and pollution.

But of course if everybody makes the switch, or if enough people do, then they will find problems such as pollution and traffic will follow them there.

You can certainly imagine that if the masses heed the advice of Sophos, Mac OS X will become a far more popular target for virus writers and hackers.

At this point the Mac zealots will be dismissing this line of discussion (or 'more f*cking pro-Microsoft bullsh*t' in their words, no doubt) as a tired old argument with no basis in truth but the fact of the matter is Apple's claims of greater robustness can only be tested when all things are equal - laboratory conditions aside.

It is certainly undeniable that the criminal fraternity have not turned their guns on Apple to anything like the extent to which they have targeted Microsoft to date.

If they do - in the unlikely event that Apple significantly increases its market share - then we will see which platform is indeed more secure.

And in case anybody does think this is pro-Microsoft propaganda (which would be a first for silicon.com), we hope that in such an event Apple would genuinely prove to be more reliable, more robust and more secure in the face of attacks because, for those users tied to a Microsoft environment for the foreseeable future, it will at least show their Seattle-based supplier how far short it is falling in its own offering. And will remove one more excuse, and one more hiding place, through a real and relevant unfavourable comparison.