This should be no surprise to anyone, but it looks like Apple’s market share growth hasn’t escaped your local malevolently minded programer. The folks at Intego released their 2009 Mac Security report last week and it highlights threats and issues, which the report says grew significantly last year.

While it’s worrisome, it’s still important to keep in mind that if you’re a Mac user the most common virus is in the form a Trojan. Which are seemingly okay programs that you download and run, but turns out they do something terrible like wipe out your hard-drive. In the good ol’ days of modems and BBS’s, Trojans were a simple script that once run would execute a silly command like “C:\>deltree -rf *” or something similar.

Today, they’re much more sophisticated like hiding in web cookies, a downloaded word processing doc, or in a downloaded (usually pirated) copy of a common program.

While your Mac is probably safe if you exercise a few simple “surfer-beware” tactics, it still doesn’t hurt to invest in an anti-virus/anti-spam package (or download one of the many free apps out there).

It’s certainly not like Win’95/’98 or even Win’XP when you had issue after issue, but if you think Macs are safe, think again.

Original article on ITProPortal here.

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