chance of introducing malware onto it. Some code is more secure than other code, but nothing is impossible to break (in the realm of consumer software, at least).

02 The Mac has had viruses in a past life

Back before OSX, there were a number of real-world viruses that would infect Macs and do all kinds of nasty things to them, making their trendy owners writhe in grandiose moaning and complaining. However, the bottom-up rewrite of the Mac operating system when Apple transitioned into OSX has completely eliminated the potential for those older viruses to infect modern Macs.

03 At the moment, your Mac is safe

At this exact moment in time, there is no malware circulating out there that can infect your Mac. No viruses, no trojan horses, no keystroke loggers, no botnets, nothing. You can surf the web, send e-mails, and chat via instant messenger until you’re blue in the face, and nothing nasty will happen to your computer. That said, there is absolutely the potential that someone will release a virus

tomorrow morning exploiting an unknown flaw in OS X, and destroying data on every net-connected Mac in the world by lunch time (oh, the horror! the cries that would rise up in SF and NYC!)

04 There is some proof-of-concept malware out there in the world

And yes, several people have already managed to create pieces of code that can do nasty things to your Mac, but these items have not yet made it out into the wild and onto Macs in the ‘real world’. And, many of them require somewhat arcane maneuvers to actually do any harm to your computer. But they are there, somewhere on Earth, right now.

05 There are definitely bugs in the Mac OS

Most malware works because it takes advantage of programming errors in the computer’s operating system. And the Mac does have it’s share of bugs, with Apple periodically releasing operating system updates to fix the most egregious or publicly visible ones. However, to date the bugs in the Mac OS have not proven to be as fertile of a breeding ground for malware developers.

06 Having Unix underneath is helpful

Underneath the covers, Mac OS 10.x is actually made up of a variant of Unix, with a lot of Apple code layered on top for Mac-specific operating system services and the visual shell that you interact with. This variant of Unix has been ‘in the wild’ for quite a while, and has become relatively secure as bugs have been found and driven out of it over the years.

07 Having Intel underneath is largely irrelevant

Some people are concerned that the switch to Intel chips may make the Mac inherently less secure, since Windows malware is designed to run on Intel (and compatible) processors. This is highly unlikely, as malware is typically written to take advantage of bugs in the operating system, and not in the underlying processor itself. However, it’s a novel approach, and someone is probably in their basement right now trying to figure out how to take advantage of it.