Say goodbye to era of Mac malware immunity

You know you've finally arrived as a software platform when hackers start gunning for you. Such is the predicament that Apple's success has brought: Sophisticated malware has started to appear that's directed specifically at Apple machines.

For years, security experts predicted that as Apple gained market share, cybercriminals would turn their attention from Windows machines toward Mac attacks. Now it appears to really be happening. Apple's Mac OS X operating system now enjoys a market share of more than 15 percent in the U.S., according to Swedish Web-monitoring service Pingdom.

Coincidentally, in a 2008 paper written for the IEEE Computer Society, Cloudmark researcher Adam O'Donnell predicted that when Apple's market share reached a "tipping point" of roughly 16 percent, then hackers would begin targeting those systems.