InfoWorld has published a “top ten underreported stories of the year” story, and weighing in at #3 is the old canard, “Hackers Take Aim at OS X.” This story is worse than many of the others, partly because it’s touted as a huge story that nobody seems to be paying attention to, and partly because it focuses purely on “vulnerabilities”–potential chinks in an OS’s security fence–and not actual hacking attempts. They give zero support to the idea that hackers are actually targeting Mac users more.

So far, the only even semi-serious threat to the Mac has been a single trojan–trojans revealing weaknesses more in users than in the OS–and there is no evidence that this one trojan had any success in duping more than just a handful of users, if even any at all. After a thorough search of the web, I could find no figures whatsoever on how many Mac users fell for the trojan–which requires a user to (a) be surfing for porn, (b) fall for the scam which says you need a codec to view a porn movie, and (c) requires the user to type in the admin password upon installation, despite a warning that a video codec needs access to change your operating system.

It should be that the whole “Hordes of Hackers are Overwhelming Macs with Attacks” diatribe is wearing thin, after being one of the most over-reported “news” stories of the year, a result of the security software peddlers relentlessly pushing this scare tactic on tech publications so they can sell as-yet unneeded products.