I found it interesting that one of the experts cited in the ZD-NET article makes the following statement:

"I put Apple a few years behind Microsoft in understanding how to manage security for the users. I put Microsoft a number of years behind the Unix community because the first systems that got hurt -- ten or fifteen years ago -- were Unix systems.

What he apparently does not understand is that the Mac OS is a Unix operating system. With the exception of the GUI and some high-level calls, the complete foundation of the Mac OS is Unix, and open-source at that. The system ships with the industry's leading software firewall (ipfw) active and ready to block access.

Because it's based on open-source, any holes in the underlying OS generally get patched by the Unix community quite quickly, and Apple is pretty quick to roll out fixes that are critical.

I will not deny that the Mac OS is open to malware attacks, but generally the vulnerability extends to destruction of local user data, and not a compromise of the OS itself. In fact most of the vulnerability comes in Windoze-generated MS Word documents with a VB script in them! How ironic...

And, I will agree with the article that Mac OS users, just like Windoze users, need to be taught good security practices. The main thing that Mac OS users can do is to create a separate user for daily work which does not have administrator priveleges. Then, whenever a piece of software wants administrator authentication, you'll know something fishy is up (unless it's for a software update...).