Mac OS X and BSD Unix topped a recent security survey with the honorable acclaim of being the “world’s safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environments.”

An article announced the report here: MacWorld: Mac OS X, BSD Unix top security survey. The actual report by mi2g is here: mi2g: The world’s safest computing environment.

The report indicated that security breaches on Mac OS X systems (and other BSD flavors) consisted of less than 5% of total breaches among all computer systems. This is serious business when mi2g estimates that the total economic damages from such breaches just in 2004 ranges between $103 to $126 billion dollars.

That’s great news, but an ugly cloud of reasonable doubt continues to loom over Apple’s shining moment: Is Apple’s success simply a result of what has come to be known as “security through obscurity”? In other words, since the market share of Mac OS X systems is so small, it simply isn’t a target for most hackers and malware authors.

The most painful part of such conjectures, of course, is that there is certainly some undeniable truth behind them. Mac OS X systems do benefit from obscurity. This does not mean that if Mac OS X systems and, say, Windows systems had their roles reversed, that Apple’s systems would necessarily experiece security breaches as bad as Microsoft’s recent debacle. Unfortunately, however, this cannot be proven, and the reasonable doubt remains.

On a positive note, emphasis has been removed from Apple’s reasonable doubt of obscurity as attention has focused on Microsoft’s horrid failure to establish security that should be considered acceptable on a professional level. This is a positive shift, since more and more individuals in the industry are seriously considering a platform shift–not so much because any other platform is more secure, but because any platform must be better than what has been going on in the Windows platform.

After all, if they’ve cracked from the stress of the environment, don’t you replace your Windows with stronger materials? ;-D