Taken from PCWorld Magazine, August 2010

Who has the safest operating system?  Apple?  Google?  Microsoft?  According to one security expert, what really matters is who’s using the OS.

“Microsoft doesn’t have a monopoly on all the technical vulnerabilities that are out there,” says Zulfikar Ramzan, technical director of Symantec Security Response.  Today’s online criminals are far more likely to target user behaviour. “You don’t need as many technical skills to find one person who might be willing, in a moment of weakness, to open up an attachment that contains malicious content,” says Ramzan.

Currently, only about 3 percent of the malware that Symantec encounters exploits a technical flaw. The other 97 percent is either “piggybacking on that 3 percent” or more likely trying to trick a user through some type of social engineering scheme, according to Ramzan.

No computer or operating system is 100 percent secure, of course.  “People have tried to attack Microsoft’s products because of the [huge] market share,” Ramzan says.  But if Google’s upcoming Chrome OS takes off in the business and consumer markets, it will have a big target on its back too.