More Mac Vulnerabilities Than Windows In 2007?

eldavojohn writes "A ZDNet blog reports stats from Secunia showing OSX averaged 20.25 vulnerabilities per month while XP & Vista combined averaged 3.67/month. Is this report card's implication accurate, or is this a symptom of one company turning a blind eye while the other concentrates on timely bugfixes? 'While Windows Vista shows fewer flaws than Windows XP and has more mitigating factors against exploitation, the addition of Windows Defender and Sidebar added 4 highly critical flaws to Vista that weren't present in Windows XP. Sidebar accounted for three of those additional vulnerabilities and it's something I am glad I don't use. The lone Defender critical vulnerability that was supposed to defend Windows Vista was ironically the first critical vulnerability for Windows Vista.'"

Comments

Re:Counting shows nothing

[ByOhTek]

Another issue would be severity.

1) Your friends flaws only allowed an administrator of the systm, on the local system to accidentally delete (but not read or otherwise modify) secur data of the users.
2) Your flaws allowed anyone to connect to the machine remotely and read/write/modify all of the secure data on the server.

Which is worse? It's severity and time of exposure. MacOS X didn't have any extremely critical vulnerabilities, but Windows had four, MacOS X had a lot more highly critical, and slightly more moderately/less critical. This makes the vulnerability count look even less meainingful (if every level counts 100x more than the previous level in terms of overall risk, and the average fix time was the same, Windows would be more vulnerable than MacOS X, even with only 15% the bug count.)