Malware authors still haven’t started targeting the Mac OS, Marius van Oers explained in a post on the McAfee computer security research blog.

Today we know of over 236,000 malicious malware items. These are mostly meant for the MS-Windows environment. Only about 700 are meant for the various Unix/Linux distributions. Current known Mac OSX malware count is even less with 7, so pretty much non-existent at the moment. For older builds of the MacOS there are 69 known malicious items, with an additional 8 items for MacHC that used hypercard script extensions which had to be manually installed as an addon package.

The 7 known malware for Mac OS X comprise of low risk threats that were only published as proof of concept code. These do not pose any risk to a fully patched and updated installation of Mac OS X. However, it still recommended that OS X users do not run their systems as root. It’s also important that Mac users enable the Mac OS Personal Firewall.

It is still my assessment that an anti-virus program for Mac OS X is unnecessary.

[OSX Malware not taking off yet]

[tags]Apple, Mac, Mac OS x, OS x, firewall, spyware, malware, security[/tags]