Judging by figures alone, Vista is more secure than Mac OSX and Linux? I somehow find this a rather strange claim, I guess these things are always subjective.

Most numbers can be moulded into any shape you want, and can show any result you like.

According to the numbers given in a new report from Microsoft, Windows Vista has blown away all the major enterprise Linux distributions and Mac OS X as far as having the smallest amount of serious security vulnerabilities in the six months since its release. The numbers were compiled by Jeff Jones, the security strategy director in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group.

“The results of the analysis show that Windows Vista continues to show a trend of fewer total and fewer High severity vulnerabilities at the 6-month mark compared to its predecessor product Windows XP (which did not benefit from the SDL [Secure Development Lifecycle] and compared to other modern competitive workstation OSes (which also did not benefit from an SDL-like process),” Jones wrote in a blog posting about the report on June 21.

I’ve heard some things about this report though, for example flaws in Firefox WERE counted under Linux, but flaws in IE were NOT counted under Vista.

In the report, available as a PDF download on Jones’ blog, Jones compares the number of vulnerabilities of critical, medium and low severity that have been discovered in Vista with those found in Windows XP, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Workstation, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS—Reduced Component Set, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.8, Novell SLED 10—Reduced Component Set and Apple Mac OS X v10.4.

The score, according to Jones: In the first six months of the Vista life cycle, Microsoft has released four major security bulletins that address 12 total vulnerabilities affecting Windows Vista.

Plus the amount of software packages included in these linux distributions are 100x times more than those in Vista, so it’s not really a fair comparison is it? I’m sure you if you counted core services and OS system files, the figures would look a lot different.

It’s a pretty comprehensive article, so do check it out and let us know what you think.

Source: Eweek