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)."

Comments

Fewer patches...

[blargfellow]

Wait...I'm supposed to think that fewer patches makes for a safer operating system?

I guess Symantec will soon be out of a job.

[bitbucketeer]

After all... who needs to buy security products for the most secure commercial OS available to mankind?

Re:Simply

[maynard]

"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.

The numbers are being misread

[christoofar]

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].

Again?

[kebes]

How many times are we going to have a "news item" that uses the same old technique to "prove" that Windows is the most secure. I'll save you the trouble of reading the article, the executive summary is something like:

"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:

39 vulnerabilities, 12 of which were ranked high priority or severe, were found in Microsoft Windows

and:

of the 208 Red Hat vulnerabilities, the most of the top five operating systems, only two were considered high severity

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.

A more useful summary

[greg1104]

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.

Logic

[volpe]

Microsoft has the most secure operating system amongst its commercial competitors [because] Microsoft Windows had the fewest number of patches [...]

Ethiopians are the healthiest people in the world because they see the fewest number of health care professionals.

Actually

[Greyfox]

My usual response to that is to challenge the speaker to do a base install of Windows and a base install of Linux or MacOS with a machine plugged into the raw internet. Then measure how many times each OS has been pwned before it's done installing. Assuming they all three survive that test, fire up a web browser and try to find out what you need to do to do a software update for your OS (After all, that's the first thing a "normal" user does, right?) and install said software update. Again measure how many times each machine was pwned by the time you got the system installed. Finally, wander off and come back a month later to measure the amount of pwnage that has occurred.

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...

Re:Actually

[Nasarius]

if you do an install of an OS without a firewall you are an idiot

No no, I'd say it's you who's hilariously stupid. Not every OS opens up all sorts of services by default, you know. A decent Linux workstation will have sshd, if anything. Most Linux installs should have a network source so that the latest package version gets installed. Not every OS installer is so poorly designed that it installs old, vulnerable packages, you know.

Re:Simply

[Lumpy]

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.