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Surprise, Windows Listed as Most Secure OS
david_g17 writes "According to a Symantec study reported by Information Week, Microsoft has the most secure operating system amongst its commercial competitors. The report only covered the last 6 months of vulnerabilities and patch releases, but the results place Microsoft operating systems above Mac OS X and Red Hat. According to the article, 'The report found that Microsoft Windows had the fewest number of patches and the shortest average patch development time of the five operating systems it monitored in the last six months of 2006.' The article continues to mention the metrics used in the study (quantity and severity of vulnerabilities as well as the amount of time one must wait for the patch to be released)."
Wait...I'm supposed to think that fewer patches makes for a safer operating system?
After all... who needs to buy security products for the most secure commercial OS available to mankind?
"And finally the old unix guys will flame about how none of these vulnerabilites would have happened if we would have stayed away from GUIs."
No. Old UNIX hackers will instead berate UNIX for being a total piece of shit and then endlessly whine about the downfall of Symbolics and its old dedicated LISP machines. And they'd be right.
If you are counting the number of patches... and you are saying Windows has the fewest number in the last 6 months than MacOS or RedHat... does that mean Windows is more secure?
What is this, 3rd grade?
I could stop patching Windows forever and it will be the bestest Operating System EV-ER! Like OMGWTFBBQ!
Seriously, Microsoft releases in cycles, has to perform a buttload of testing (because of the DNS patch which screwed over a lot of customers), and is slow to react to 0day problems that are brought up with theories and proofs. [They do a lot better when there is an active attack going on, I'll give you that].
I get SuSE patches for hundreds of installed packages just about every other day and install most of them automatically. The kernel I'll patch up once every 6 months or so.
Does that make me less secure than Windows? I don't know. I sure feel more secure about putting a fresh openSuSE 10.2 box on the internet unfirewalled than putting a Vista box on the Internet unfirewalled [I wonder if MSFT has actually performed this test with Vista... to see how long it takes before a basic Vista install gets compromised with the software firewall turned off].
Symantec (who makes all of their profit from selling security products for Windows) says Windows is the way to go.
Patch release count is probably the worst security metric that you could come up with.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
*Symantec* released the report. How many products does Symantec make for non-Windows OSs? Or was their research "Windows XP with Norton Internet Security Suite 2007 installed"?
This is not news. This is a Symantec marketing campaign disguised as a press release disguised as a research report.
Never mind the false conclusion that fewer patches = more secure. Never mind that both OS X (which had MOAB) and RHEL both include a lot more software than the base OS for Windows.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Bot herders has named Windows as the most reliable operating system for hosting botnets and spam machines.
Congratulations all around Microsoft.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
"The total number of reported vulnerabilities for Windows was lower than for others, therefore it is the most secure."
Wow. That kind of logic would get you a failing grade in any undergraduate class. When TFA actually goes into the breakdown of "severe" versus "not severe." The article even says: and: So having 2 severe vulnerabilities makes it less secure than Windows having 12 severe vulnerabilities? Something doesn't add up. That's even assuming their numbers are correct, which I sincerely doubt. Another flaw in logic (that we've seen many times) is that the total number of publically disclosed vulnerabilities turns out to be higher for the development model that involves full-disclosure, rather than the one that involves hiding information as much as possible. This isn't exactly surprising, and says nothing about how many vulnerabilities actually exist.
Counting vulnerabilities seems like a very silly way to gauge security. It seems like a truer test would be to set up a machine (or rather, a statisically significant bunch of machines) and measure the average time to system compromise. Even this technique has its flaws, of course, but at least it's better than some arbitrary counting technique.
Like the total count of all vulnerabilities, including all the little impossible to exploit ones, is important. Let's focus on the serious ones mentioned in their data.
High-severity security vulnerabilities in 2006
Windows: Q1/2=5 Q3/4=12 Total=17
RedHat Linux: Q1/2=1 Q3/4=2 Total=3
Mac OS X: Q1/2=3 Q3/4=1 Total=4
Now that's a summary I can agree with.
Ethiopians are the healthiest people in the world because they see the fewest number of health care professionals.
This usually makes the "Windows is more secure" group STFU pretty quickly, for some reason. They also say "DOH!" just like Homer Simpson at least 4 times while I'm issueing my challenge. I'm really not entirely sure why...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Redhat particularly, but also Mac, bundle more software. This means you have many more lower priority vulnerabilities because you have more LOC in userspace. Does a bug in VLC equate to an OS bug? How about Firefox? Can it be used to root your system? All grey areas. Given that, the total numbers of bugs are not surprising at all and the low number of high priority bugs is telling to the extent that patch numbers are a valid measure at all. Taking a while to fix higher numbers of low priority bugs isn't a big deal as long as the high priority bugs are dealt with quickly. That would be the obvious follow up question, which they did not apparently ask. Another obvious question is who reported the defects? Are these vendor provided numbers or third party (e.g. CERT) security alerts? Another question no one (except Sun) bothered to ask.
The summary is that over the last 6 months, Windows had the fewest number of bugs (regardless of severity) and took the shortest amount of time to fix them.
a)What is not mentioned is that Windows had the most number of severe bugs. Windows had 12, OS X 1. But it didn't mention how many severe bugs Linux had.
b. Also what isn't noted is methodology. The time between bug and patch is mentioned but not whether time is between the bug being discovered or being announced. With open source, almost all bugs are announced when they are discovered. With closed source, it is not the same. MS has in the past sat on bugs for months, years before announcing them much less working on them.
c. This only covers the last 6 months. Why only 6 months? Surely a more representative sample would be years. In this case, MS doesn't look so good. Didn't BSD have it's 2nd bug in a decade recently?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
While I don't think Windows is the most secure OS, its not fair to compare the number of patches released by a Linux packaging system to the number released by Microsoft for their base OS. The various repositories include every conceivable type of software for Linux and updates for that software while I assume Symantec (no I didn't read the article) is referring to updates just for Windows, not every piece of software on Windows. Your comparison only makes sense if you compare the SUSE repository software updates with every Windows software update.
What you really want is the number of zero-day exploits. Vulnerabilities that are patched prior to an exploit are of far less concern than vulnerabilities that are exploited (NOT counting proof-of-concept "exploits") prior to a patch becoming available. Even I have seen reports of several zero-day exploits against WIndows in my recent memory, and I don't even use Windows or pay much attention to those notices....
If we assume that the vast majority of people who find security holes do the right thing and notify the vendor, then we can conclude that the vast majority of security holes should not be exploited prior to it being patched. From this, we can conclude from the relatively high zero-day-flaws-to-patch-count ratio that the vast majority of known Windows security holes probably remain unpatched, thus making the above numbers dramatically understated. Just a hunch.
If an operating system is more secure because the vendor has made less security fixes, that would make RedHat 1.0 the most secure OS of all. It probably hasn't had any security fixes in the better part of a decade. It's roughly equivalent to saying that the Ford Pinto is the safest car made in the last thirty years because the manufacturer only released one safety recall, while my Ford Windstar (with dual airbags, rear shoulder belts, anti-lock brakes, etc.) had at least three. See how silly that argument is? :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Norton used to be awesome as well. Norton Commander on my PC XT (the 86-88 version of nc)? It used up only a tiny portion of memory, it was fast, extremely useful. Norton Utilities (disk doctor specifically) from the same time saved my ass several times. Now? I had my mom uninstall all Symantec software from her Windows XP machine. She used a competing anti-virus problem, relied on her hardware firewall's protection (came with the ISP!), and the speed gains from the computer.. it was like night and day. Before, it took 5 minutes after bootup for the machine to become usable as Norton Internet Security did all sorts of things that you can't turn off, and it slowed the computer down during normal use as well. What a difference two decades makes!
The funny part is these "studies" are so biased even if they TRY not to be.
they call redhat everything that was on the install Discs. Yes OSX and Windows get to only be the fricking OS.
Giving redhat a mark because there was a sendmail security fix is complete utter BS.
a fairer comparison would be redhat to all microsoft products rolled together. Because that is what redhat is. It's Windows XP, windows server 2003 IIS SQL sourcesafe exchange access word excel media server media center outlook media player, etc... all together. Oh dont forget Visual studio 2005 and all it's plugins as redhat out of the box has a full development kit installed.
Call me when they do that or ignore all the server apps and other apps that come on the CD. These nimrods at symantec simply looked at errata published duting the time. redhat supports 100X more apps in the core OS than micorosft sells all together and issues fixes and errata for all of those. Microsoft tells you to pound sand when your virus scanner eats your PC.
Big difference.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"Starts" affecting?
That assumes that these decision-making processes were once made rationally.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Symantec is where good software goes to die. For example: Norton Utilities, Ghost, BackupExec.
The big comparison I make is the severity of the problem. A lot of the security fixes seen in OS X are related to applications, things like "a maliciously crafted quicktime movie could lead to elevated privleges". This is a whole world different than "a buffer overflow in the TCP stack allows remote code execution". The former you can get hit by if you are running malware, the latter comes and gets your computer and integrates it into another botnet while you sleep.
I'll take the former over the latter anyday. Most of the nasties windows copes with are things that will ambush you when you are doing what should be totally safe things, like browsing a web site or just plain being connected to the internet without a firewall. I don't know how anyone can claim a system that is just plain unsafe to connect to the internet without spending three hours patching it and loading up defensive software is more secure than anything
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