I have a feeling that would make very little to no difference at all. This worm infiltrated systems of more than just one operating system.

Although if I'm thinking of the same trade show you are, the savvy Mac hound jumped in through an exploit in Adobe Flash Player to attack Safari in order to win a MacBook Air. And he did. Apple patched that hole quickly, and Adobe a couple of weeks later. Nothing like an incentive.

Fortunately, for every hole found, Apple and Microsoft are quick to release security updates. (And Adobe, a couple of months later.)

You have a good memory Z, and ya he won a MacBook Air. regardles of the exploits avenue in, they are found everyday in any system. And impossible to defend 100% against.

I myself fell prey to an insidious worm 2 years ago called Windows Police Pro. It rode in on a torrent download of a movie and hid itself disguised as am authentic looking prompt box asking to download Real Player codex. When you click yes, it sets itself into your registry not only as trusted, but as your choice of virus protection and disabling all others. All the while replicating malware all through computer faster than you can keep up with. It played a cat and mouse game that in the end won and crippled my machine. I ended up reformatting and lost alot of data. BTW, if you ever try to get your money back from Norton, good luck. They stiffed me and wouldn't even respond back to my requests I sent with documentation of the Program I bought from them along with the validation key as proof.

I'll tell you exactly what I tell my clients. Take a good look at your paid version of {Norton, McAfee, AVG, …}. Now take a look at the free, fast, and shockingly good Microsoft Security Essentials. Decide if you want to continue paying for bloated protection or if you'd rather use a free anti-malware program that doesn't slow your system down.

I've been installing it on systems that I refurbish at work. One customer told my co-worker how he had just paid over $100 for a full version of Norton only to get infected a week later. He sent him on his way, MSSE in tow.

I just used Security Essentials to clean up a nasty infestation that I couldn't touch with a combination of AVG, Hijack This, Malware bytes, and ingenuity.

malwarebytes couldn't do it?

I love MBAM...

Well, I don't run any anti-virus software or firewalls. I DL'd and installed Security Essentials and had 0 infections. I must be doing something right!

Had a laptop come through work with a long list of infections, the most troublesome of them being Conficker. Security essentials took it right out.

I haven't been running any on my desktop, but figured I could find a spot somewhere in my 12GB of memory for security essentials.