I recently worked with a specialized team that assisted some high-profile, quasi-governmental entities in comprehensively assessing the current state of Mac OS security. Based upon that and other vectors, I've got some info that may or may not be of interest to yourself and others here.

If you're implying this new exploit and perhaps the other high-profile malware issues in more recents years is indicative of hacker interest due to surging Mac OS market share, I'm not sure that's entirely correct.

Outside of Apple iOS (mobile), Mac OS X (desktops and laptops) market share hasn't risen relatively that much over the past decade or so. And, in recent times, even the peak is only a few percentage points higher than it's been for many years.

When Mac OS market share was lower back in its Mac OS 9 days, there were far more widespread, problematic malware issues (viruses, trojans, etc.) that were propagating fairly well in the wild (by Apple's standards). That scenario proves that hackers were interested in Mac OS devices even when the Mac OS market share was lower than it is today.

Since the 90's, Macs have hovered around approximately 1 in 10 (give or take) of all computers in the United States with a customer base of a predominately higher income demographic. In other words, one may very well get more money out of a smaller subset of Mac users than a larger group of typical Windows users. Therefore, Macs have always been a target for a subset of hackers that, er... "specialize" in that kind of scenario.

In other words, while Mac OS market share may play some minor role in hacker interest in the platform overall in recent times, there hasn't been a huge surge in market share that would account for some radically increased hacker interest.

The reason malware was drastically reduced on the Mac platform since it switched from OS 9 to OS X (based upon a flavor of UNIX) was because of the superior security Mac OS X afforded the platform compared to Mac OS 9. That's why even as market share gradually climbed, overall Mac OS malware dropped dramatically for most of the past decade until more recent years.

I think the relatively small increase in malware (compared to Mac OS 9) for Mac OS X in the last few years is due to the fact that over time hackers are more likely to find exploits the longer they poke and prod at an OS. Also, over time, Apple programmers are increasingly likely to make mistakes here and there as time and piles of code goes on.

And, perhaps Apple is slipping in quality in regards to security for various reasons since their resources have been somewhat distracted with iOS devices in more recent years. Plus, over time, the amount of hackers, hacking skills, knowledge and tools have been increasing and improving quite drastically worldwide especially more so in recent years.

On top of those issues, there's been more attention brought to Apple via an iOS halo effect from iPads and iPhones that perhaps plays into more hacker interest in the Mac OS. I also suspect that the abundance of high-profile Apple commercials over the years has perhaps influenced some hacker perceptions that the Mac OS platform is more ubiquitous than it really is. And, the icing on the cake is perhaps more disgruntled hackers and hacktivists who are increasingly disillusioned or even hostile with the Apple brand for various reasons over the years.

But, as far as purely Mac OS X market share goes, there really hasn't been that large of an uptick to prod properly educated hackers to take much more interest than they did a few years ago or even a decade ago overall based upon market share alone.