There are plenty of *nix viruses around, except they are usually known as worms.

The first author[1] of a successful worm[2] did become quite famous from it, later did a startup[3] and even later went on to be one of the co-founders of this thing called YCombinator[4].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb

[4] Seriously?

FWIW, the Morris worm was a Unix worm from the 80's. It's not quite on par with the malware you'd see roaming around on Linux machines today, if such malware does exist and is, in fact, roaming around.

The existence of the Morris worm doesn't really say much about the resilience of today's Linux to worms or viruses.

I'm not sure what your point is.

Yes, malware can be a lot more sophisticated now than it was in 1988. In many cases it doesn't need to be though. For example, there was a comparatively recent case of a botnet infecting Linux-based routers which lacked front end authentication[2](!!).

Exploitable software runs on many platforms.

The existence of the Michelangelo virus[1] doesn't really say much about the resilience of today's Windows to worms or viruses.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo_(computer_virus)

[2] http://lwn.net/Articles/325434/

There are OS X viruses out there. Linux would be harder because of an increased fragmentation and systems being more up-to-date generally (especially since linux is commonly used on servers, and thus held up to a different standard of security in first place)

On windows or mac, getting a virus to run is generally just a matter of packaging it with some downloadable software. In linux, pretty much everything is available through package managers. You can't just throw a virus into a torrent for photoshop or whatever.

That being said, I'm by no means an expert.

They certainly exist, but nobody has successfully created one that has spread to the levels seen on Windows system. That's really what I'm referring to: Something that would cause panic in the media, so to speak. Code that attacks a small handful of systems isn't particularly interesting to anyone, no matter what platform it targets, Windows included.

I respectfully disagree. Fully functioning and frequently self-replicating malware does now exist in the wild for the Mac platform.

I've seen drive-by website infections, malicious software installs using social attacks, and malicious attachments infecting Office. When Flashback alone infecting the better part of one million Macs, it is now newsworthy.