Macintosh Malware is a reality now.

So the Apple OS is vulnerable to malware after all. They thought their ivory tower was impregnable due to the UNIX based operating system that Apple machines run, but it seems that was not the case after all. This is only the beginning of the malware that might target Apple Macintosh systems in the future if something is not done very soon to fix this horrible mess that will cause many problems with all Apple Macintosh OS X users. You would expect a UNIX based operating system that is based on a very secure codebase would be very secure, but that depends on who the developers and maintainers are does it not? Apple need to get a clue and work out how to best protect their users from dangerous malware and do this very soon before the king tide of keyloggers and other malicious software ends up on the computers of Apple Macintosh computers, which are rather good computers actually, but are not as secure as the fans believe and need to be protected from viruses and malware just like Windows computers do, they are famously vulnerable to viruses and many, many other threats. Linux and UNIX distributions like OpenBSD are very secure as long as you keep maintaining your system and keep up to date with your software patches and updates.

The Mac Defender software is actually a malware program that can be automatically downloaded to your Macintosh machine and then execute to install the malware program on your computer that will attempt to steal your credit card details. The OS X versions affected are: Mac OS X 10.4, Mac OS X 10.6 & Mac OS X 10.5.  The future of Mac OS X looks like the same one as Windows, where the users have to install something like Nortons Antivirus suite or Symantec. Linux has plenty of security issues with various packages, but they once the problem is identified, it is dealt with very quickly and a security patch pushed into the standard update cycle quite soon after the exploit was discovered. This is the strength of Linux over the proprietary operating systems like Apple Macintosh operating systems and Windows. Sure Microsoft Security Essentials is actually a very good anti-virus suite but it is not perfect, you just need to use a more secure browser than IE. That reminds me that possibly installing Firefox instead of Safari would help with this whole situation, as  far as I know, Firefox will not automatically download files, they are saved in ~/Downloads and then you can do whatever you want with the file. You can disable automatic file downloads by following this simple tip [http://answers.yahoo.com]. Then this malware should not affect you at all, unless they can trick the Firefox web browser into doing the same thing as Safari, but that is unlikely. It seems they will be busy pushing out quite a lot of updates to fix this, but that will take a lot of patches and would be a huge job considering the amount of users which makes the Macintosh platform a huge target in the first place.