An employee helps a customer at an Apple store in San Francisco Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

I'm still not abiding what I did to set it off. All I apperceive is that I was blithely surfing the Web application Apple's Safari browser on my MacBook Air aftermost week, and a folio anecdotic itself as "Apple aegis center" popped up. It declared that my Mac had 75 viruses, again launched the accession accepted for article alleged Mac Protector.

Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. I'm appealing acute for my age — and I apprehend my tech blogs — so I knew it was a Trojan horse, assuming to acquisition malware on my computer so it could action to advertise me anti-malware software. If I bit, it would try to abduct my credit-card information. (Similar scams accept adamant Windows users for years.)

I bankrupt the aegis center, again canceled out of the installer and abject it into the trash. The advance was over, and my Mac and abstracts were never absolutely at risk. (See the top 10 Internet blunders.)Still, it was an alarming experience. For years, attacks adjoin Apple's OS X operating arrangement accept had a aroma of burghal fable about them. Security advisers accept again accepted that Macs aren't impervious, but the troublemakers accept mostly steered clear. They've been too active inflicting affliction on a far bigger, juicer target: Windows.

Mac Protector is real, and it's agriculture up in variants with names such as Mac Defender and MacGuard. They're landing on abundant Macs that Apple appear an OS X amend this anniversary advised to antithesis them. Whereupon a version of the Trojan that bypassed the new security measures immediately appeared. (This could go on for a while.)The attacks on Macs and Apple's acknowledgment to them accept afflicted up new altercation in an age-old debate. Is OS X abnormally able-bodied adequate from cybercrooks? As its bazaar allotment increases, will it become a added adorable target? Are Mac users who don't use aegis software allurement for trouble?

These questions complete simple enough, but the altercation has been fueled as abundant by affect and backroom as by rational analysis. Some Mac admirers accept behaved as if it were their affirmation to alive in a amiable kingdom. They shouldn't. Some Windows users, agog to apprentice what schadenfreude feels like, accumulate admiration that the sky is about to blast bottomward on Macheads. It hasn't. Software companies that advertise Mac anti-malware utilities like to bell in regularly. Guess what attitude they tend to take?(See the best netbooks and netbook accessories.)The aboriginal affair to accept about Mac Defender/Protector/Guard is that it's aloof one attack, and not a decidedly aberrant one. Even in its best pernicious anatomy to date, it can do its bedraggled assignment alone if its advised victim decides to install an alien allotment of software that appears from boilerplate — which cipher should do beneath any circumstances. It's additionally a breeze to remove, clashing abounding Windows-based affected antivirus Trojans. (They can be around absurd to eradicate after the advice of third-party software.)
Moreover, the scariest pieces of malware aren't Trojans; they're added adult threats like botnets,

(See a brief history of the computer.)
So is it time for Mac aficionados to accept defeat and install aegis software? I asked a agglomeration of the brainiest ones I know: my pals on Twitter. Some told me that they're already active utilities from companies such as Symantec and Sophos. The all-inclusive majority, however, including able savants like Macworld editors, said they still don't.

That's a condonable stance. (At atomic I achievement so, back it's the one I'm practicing for now.) Aegis software isn't after its own downsides. Even the best bales crave a assertive bulk of babysitting; the affliction ones get in your face, bog bottomward your arrangement and balance on the border of actuality added of a altercation than the dangers they're meant to assure you against.

When I anticipate of computer security, I'm reminded of the barn at the San Francisco accommodation area I acclimated to live. For a while, it got burst into about every weekend. After the bad guys fabricated off with my bike, I anchored aggregate abroad I cared about. Even admitting my being was analytic safe, annoying about added intrusions on an advancing base was no fun.

Windows PCs accept at times seemed to be beneath abiding siege, like that garage. Macs never have. But these new attacks aren't a daydream scenario, aloof affirmation that there's no such affair as certain computing. Smart Mac users knew that all forth — they accumulate their cool, but they additionally accumulate their experience about them. And they're a lot beneath acceptable to be endangered by approaching attacks than bodies whose mantra is "It can't appear here."