I shouldn’t get smug. After all, I did pay a little over the odds to get into this exclusive club of Mac users. But oh, the collateral benefits.

I’m currently dialled up to ClearNet. I’ve opened up Port 135 on the built in firewall and I’ve got Ethereal listening in. And in the last 20 minutes, the iBook has had probes from 14 separate machines trying to infect my iBook with the Blaster worm.

Due to the Mac’s low market-share, no-one seriously writes viruses and worms that attack the Mac. The code just wouldn’t propagate fast enough for the socially maladjusted virus writer to get a hard-on… and given that there’s all those Windows machines out there presenting a very high-profile soft target why bother. Code your malware for Windows instead, get the biggest bang for your buck.

My only concern is the Windows users in the family. Luckily both my parents and Becky’s parents are running older Windows machines (Win ME and 95 respectively) so they are not affected (this time). Which is lucky – if this rate of infection is common, then people’s machines will get infected so soon after dialup to the Internet that they won’t actually manage to connect to Microsoft, let alone successfully download the patch before they get hit. Imagine trying to do long-distance tech support when that happens.

But in the meantime, I can sit here and watch it wash over the iBook, leaving it unaffected. Ahhh.