Apple talks up security

"They haven't given me any reason not to trust what they've been releasing," she said.

Indeed, the Mac's strongest selling point is its track record. Schiller and others point out that the Mac has proved to be a much lower security risk in recent years, with most of the vulnerabilities being caught at the potential stage -- or before customers have actually been affected. Schiller said Apple has fixed 138 issues in 43 security updates since the debut of Mac OS X, with only one of those considered critical. "Windows XP has had 77 updates in that time," Schiller said. "Two-thirds of those updates have been critical."

Analysts agree that Mac OS X has so far proved to be more secure than Windows.

"They've had less patches," said Ray Wagner, a research director at Gartner. "We're not talking an order of magnitude (less). We're talking maybe half as many."

The bigger they are...
However, the question is whether that will continue to be the case. The Mac has attracted somewhat less attention from hackers because of its niche position in the PC market -- it holds less than 5 percent market share worldwide. Because Macs are fewer in number, it would be tough for a Mac-centred mass-mailing worm to find enough targets to allow it to propagate effectively.

On the flip side, the company is gaining cachet in the Unix world that some say could make Apple a juicier target in the future. Additionally, security companies may devote more time to finding Mac OS holes, which could lead to more discoveries.

Others say the current challenges add up to adolescent growing pains as the company and Mac OS X mature.

"Apple is coming to terms with dealing with these types of issues," said independent security researcher Richard Forno, who also noted that Apple has offered a much more stable and secure option than Windows.

Most of the vulnerabilities that have been found have been in the Mac's Unix underpinnings, rather than in the Mac OS shell. And the code base itself -- a version of BSD Unix -- is pretty well tried and true because it's been in use for more than a decade.

Despite its relative stability, one challenge is that the average Mac user may not even be aware that the OS contains all this Unix code that could potentially have holes.

"It's kind of new for all Mac users, unless they had a good Unix background to begin with," said Michael Junkroski, who, along with his brother Patrick, runs VSM.net, an IT consultancy that is an all-Mac shop. "I think we were all probably a little lax because we thought the OS was impenetrable."

Junkroski said there are 55,000 viruses in the wild that affect Windows machines, compared with zero for Mac OS X. "In theory, a few (vulnerabilities) have been found. In practice, nothing has happened."

For its part, Schiller said, Apple has learned some lessons and is working on a complete fix for the latest bug.

"We fixed one part of what is a complex problem. We're working on fixes to the other parts, and there will be more coming," Schiller said. "We were more interested in getting out the first part of the fix as fast as we can... It can help people right now. Now we'll follow up with more things as we finish the rest of this complex problem."