FLAMING RETORT: All this new Mac malware - whose fault is it?

Flaming Retort is back, this time trying to Coole and Explayne Ye Flames we've had from some Mac users (and the discomfiture we know that many others have endured) in the past few days.

In a back-to-front way of making Mac fans feel better, I'll start by making everyone feel slightly worse, taking a small potshot at Windows, OS X and Linux fans alike.

My point here is not to prove that it is somebody's fault, but simply to remind us that perennially finding someone else to blame for our computer security woes is a bad idea.

Let's start with Windows users.

Last year, Sophos bought a job-lot of USB keys from a rail company's annual lost property auction. Two-thirds of them contained malware - all of it for Windows.

Not one file on any of the keys was encrypted, even though many of the files contained personal or business information.

This shouldn't be happening in the 2010s.Any decent anti-virus software should have made mincemeat of the malware infections on the keys we acquired.

And the free encryption tool [download link, Windows only, ungated] makes it easy to secure your files when you're taking them on the road.

Let's move on to OS X, which has been under the pump over the last couple of weeks, as Apple has scrambled to catch up with its Java updates and to deliver some kind of mitigation tool for users who got hit by the Flashback malware as a result.

It's easy to blame someone else. It's Apple's fault for not patching fast enough. It's Oracle's fault for the vulnerability in Java. It's Sophos's fault for making a conspiracy theory to boost sales of its free product. (No, I don't quite get that last complaint, either.)

Many of the Mac users who were hit by Flashback and who didn't have an anti-virus to help them out probably didn't even notice that anything untoward had happened. Mac users aren't much used to so-called drive-by installs.

That's where the crooks exploit a vulnerability so they can bypass the usual "do you want to download/this file comes from the internet/there is still time to save yourself" notifications from your browser, and sneak malware onto your computer without warning or consent.

But Flashback isn't the only malware out there for the Mac. According to SophosLabs, more than three-quarters of last week's malware reports from Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac were for other families of badware, including a lot of year-or-more-old stuff.