The Most Dangerous OS: Mac OS X

Contrary to general belief, Windows has not been the riskiest OS to use in 2010, according to a “most dangerous list” released by security software firm Trend Micro. The company also listed the most unsafe website, hardware, social network, top level domain and file format

Apple CEO Steve Jobs

Trend Micro crowned Apple’s Mac OS X as the riskiest OS of 2010. The company did not provide further details, but pointed to a massive 644 MB security update in April of 2010, which followed a patch that was released 10 months earlier. Trend Micro said that Apple’s “penchant for secrecy” and long patch cycles increase the risk for users. There was no information whether and how possible vulnerabilities were exploited, but it is clear that the growing popularity of Mac OS X makes the operating system a much more lucrative target for malware.
Trend Micro’s Martin Roesler chose the German identification card reader as the most dangerous hardware of the year, WordPress as the most dangerous software and Internet Relay Chat as the most dangerous use of the Internet Protocol (IP). As most dangerous infection channel, or path users acquire malware, Trend Micro mentioned the web browser.
Google received the honors for the most dangerous website due to blackhat-SEO schemes and resulting malware threats as well as ads that were spiked with malware. Facebook was the most dangerous social network and PDF the riskiest file format to use – no surprises here. Despite Microsoft’s recent attempts to portray IE as a secure browser, Roesler said that IE’s runtime environment was particularly dangerous to use, while Java is quickly catching up
.