I never said it can't be penetrated in the wild. But it hasn't been. Not in a decade of operation on millions of machines. And the original point of the conversation was this is not because of "obscurity". People like to think that if someday OS X gets a market share above a certain number, that'll flip some magic switch somewhere, and suddenly virus writers will get light bulbs over their heads and say, "Oh yeah! Macs exist! Forgot all about those!" That argument is bullshit. Whether the market share is 5% or 9%, the idea that in ten years not one single person has even tried to exploit OS X's security in the wild is stupidly naive.
Again, I'll cite history: the Classic Mac OS was definitely susceptible to viruses (I remember my high school's computer lab got hammered by the Michelangelo virus in the early 90s). There was even a Mac-specific antivirus program called "Disinfectant" or something like that. The Classic OS was even more "obscure" in terms of market share than OS X is: yet OS X doesn't even suffer the same security difficulties of its predecessor, much less those of Windows.
"Security by obscurity" is a cop-out argument espoused by Windows apologists who have no idea what actually makes an OS secure. Windows wasn't designed with security in mind when it was first created, so it's spent the past 20+ years trying to plug holes in a leaky boat. OS X was designed with security as one of its defining features, which makes it far more difficult to exploit than Windows.
A better analogy than "security by obscurity" is this: Windows is the equivalent of an apartment complex in the Bronx. It gets broken into on a regular basis, because the locks on the doors suck, the windows don't have any bars on them, and people leave their shit lying around in plain sight behind doors secured with flimsy, decades-old chain locks. In short, it's an easy target. Simple to break into, and even if the building superintendent outfits the doors with better locks, you can always break in through a window or tunnel under the rotting floorboards instead. OS X, by comparison, is a bank vault. You can still break into it, but you need specialised equipment, you need know-how, you need to be able to take down the security guards, keep the teller from tripping the silent alarm, etc. There's 91 shitty, unsecured apartment complexes in this corner of the Bronx, versus nine banks with heavily guarded vaults having doors built out of three-foot-thick stainless steel. As a criminal, which one are you going to go for?
Kai Hamuti.
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