Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 20th Dec 2007 21:42 UTC
It's the time of year again, folks. "The year 2007 has been an interesting year that brought us improved security with Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard (10.5). But to get some perspective of how many publicly known holes found in these two operating systems, I've compiled all the security flaws in Mac OS X and Windows XP and Vista and placed them side by side. This is significant because it shows a trend that can give us a good estimate for how many flaws we can expect to find in the coming months." Do with it as you please.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Sort of. Lets take an OS like SkyOS it does not really have anyone looking for security related bugs. Maybe the author and 1 or 2 others but they are focused on developing the software not finding security flaws. So in this scenario we can say nothing about the code from a security point of view because no one is looking for flaws.
No at the other end of the spectrum you have Microsoft OS's (XP SP2 and greater). This software has thousands - if not more - highly skilled people looking for flaws. The number of people looking for flaws is strongly correlated to the number of flaws found i.e. it does not explain all the variability in flaws found but is explains a lot of it. It therefore follows that if the number of flaws found is decreasing and if the number of people looking for flaws is constant or increasing then the quality from a security point of view is increasing.
Now lets look at MacOS. The number of people looking for MacOS related security flaws has increased dramatically as the market share has increased. Still it is likely that they don't have anywhere near the number of people looking for flaws as Windows does. Now MacOS includes a lot of software they didn't write but still based on the oder of magnitude difference in flaws it is highly probable the the quality for software from a security point of view is far better in Windows than MacOS currently.
Of course you are still safer using MacOS than Windows beause MacOS is not a target yet. So I am sure Apple will get their house in order in time.