Study Recommends Mac OS X as Safest OS

Posted by michael on Tuesday November 2, 2004 @06:03AM from the safety-first dept.

rocketjam writes "The British security firm mi2g has concluded a comprehensive 12-month study to identify the safest 24/7 computing environment. In the end, the open source BSD and Mac OS X came out on top with the fewest security breaches against permanently connected machines worldwide in homes, small businesses, large enterprises and governments. The study found Linux to be the most breached environment 'in terms of manual hacker attacks overall and accounts for 65.64% of all breaches recorded'. Windows was the most breached environment in government computing and led Linux, BSD and Mac OS X by far in economic damage caused by breaches." We mentioned their previous study too. As before, the study ignores the thousands of automatically-spreading viruses for Windows.

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Breaches Recorded by kevjava · 2004-11-02 06:27 · Score: 5, Interesting

As a Mac user and Linux guy, I have to say that this kind of study is a little tilted... how many Mac users and Windows users really know how to record a breach into their machine? Neither ships with process accounting on out of the box, to my knowledge.

I recently had some puke engage in comment spamming my website. Traceback revealed he was using a Windows XP machine infected with the Subseven trojan. I'd be willing to bet that breach was not recorded.