Michael J. Mahon wrote:
It's hard to know how much more secure OS X is than Windows XP. To make a real comparison you'd have to normalize to the number of attempts. Since Mac OS is a small target, it is attacked *very* much less than Windows platforms (like Linux).
That -sounds- logical enough, but having attended a few DefCons, I can assure you that it isn't the entire case and a bit misleading. It's more and more about psychology and the percieved rewards.
Attacks on all flavors of Unix/Linux/BSD combined outnumber Windows attacks. *nix exploits tend to be malicious, attempting to cause damage, or open the system to unauthorized access to data.
Windows exploits tend to be either malicious, or more recently, for lucrative gain of the hacker - either because he's set up a bot-net, a spam relay network or whatever. It's all about making money.
Windows is a tempting target not just because it's the most prevalent operating system - it's because it's generally the biggest installed base of poorly secured systems out there that make it a target of opportunity. It's the low hanging fruit. Microsoft didn't make security a priority for their platform until rather late (Windows 2000) - not until after several very public, humiliating incidents. Also, Microsoft users are not security coucious generally - until bitten.
To make Windows more mainstream, user friendly, MS chucked security out all together in some instances, so security since then has been tacked on, cobbled together. We have patches for security patches.
Windows Vista will be easier and more appropriate to compare the OS X security. Especially since Apple and Microsoft have been reading/ripping from each other's feature list for the last two years.