By Trojan horses or Trojans, I mean the classic "looks like a free copy of Office, in reality is a script that wipes your home directory" definition. With that in mind, how vulnerable is the Mac operating system to Trojans?
Well, the best answer is, it depends on your privilege level when you run the application. If you're logged in as root, (never really a good idea in the GUI), then you're in the same boat as someone running as a local administrator in Windows.
The particular boat I speak of would be the Titanic. Root is effectively god. Anything you run as root runs with god-like privileges. You run a Trojan as root, there's nothing the operating system can do to stop it. Luckily, Apple disables root login, and makes it at least somewhat inconvenient to enable root.
Unlike Windows, at least Windows XP, you can run a Mac for years and not have to log in as root. (Vista has improved that issue, but Microsoft still gives administrator users too much direct power.) The solution here? Don't do that, i.e., don't log in as root unless you absolutely need to, don't run as root unless you absolutely need to.
If you aren't sure if you need to, the answer is probably "no". As with phishing, antivirus and other similar utilities will do you no good, because once an application is running as root, it's trivial to disable such things.
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