Apple Devices Targeted for Trojans

Question

Well, it had to happen sooner, or later. For decades, Mac-users have touted the advanced security of all Apple devices, against viruses, Trojans, spy-ware and malware. They wave that banner as the equipment's superiority. Much of the truth of that matter has been their tiny market share. Most writers of malware have just not taken the time to target Apple devices. Well, enter the iPad. Guess who is the target of a recent hacking? One of the intents of this pair was to write and distribute Trojans onto all iPads. Read all about it HERE. It appears that so far, all that has been done is a major security compromise, but read what the final goal was - distribute nasties to all iPads.
Guess that PC's are not the only vulnerable devices on the planet.
Hunt
PS - I can just see the new ad now:
Man at pool - "How can you read that device - out here in this light?"
Lady at pool - "Oh, it's a Kindle, and I can read it in any light."
Background audio - "Achoo-o-o-o!"
Lady at pool - "Seems that your iPad has caught a virus... "

Answer 1

I know we're talking about Apple devices, but according to everything I have read, Windows 7 is more secure than OS X. As you stated, the Apple desktop/laptop market share has been traditionally too small for hackers to bother with. Mercy on the Mac user when/if they get deluged with the kind of garbage us PC users have grown accustomed to dealing with. I really don't think the Mac people are ready for that.  Just yesterday I visited a client who uses both Macs and PCs to check for malware and key loggers before we put together their new ecommerce solution. They have no anti-virus or malware protection  on their Macs at all.  This seems to be pretty much the norm for the Mac community.
Purely malicious virus and malware development is a lot less common these days than the newer breed of profitable malware. Stealth malware that turns computers into spam dispensers is currently the greatest threat.  Somewhat recently Open Source PHP programs like OSCommerce have become targets for hackers.  The owner of the company that hosts my website has had his share of headaches related to that.  For example many if not most hosting services include CPanel which has a feature called Fantastico.  You go into that panel and around 60 PHP Open Source programs are available for install into your domain. These programs include website calendars, shopping carts and forums just to name a few.
Take the shopping cart program OSCommerce for example.  Let's say, you run a hosting service and many of your customers install the free OSCommerce shopping cart.  When they installed it, they didn't take the appropriate security precautions like changing the "Admin" folder to something cryptic etc.  They load their cart up with inventory and the Open source community who built the program, stops supporting it. No more security updates. It exists everywhere on your hosting company's servers without being updated in years.  This is currently one of the prime targets for hackers.  What does a hosting company do, tell  clients to use another shopping cart solution?  From what I have read, hosting services that have OSCommerce installed on their servers even need to notch down their server security settings because the program won't run on Free BSD servers running the latest security patches.
The solution is simple, but obviously not practiced.  If people just used their head and NEVER clicked on spam emails, the malware for profit industry would die out.  I suppose, unfortunately we might just go back to frustrated genius hackers creating destructive malware and viruses because they were forced to work a traditional job.