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:Nonsense

[Midnight Thunder]

Agreed, although not all the "vulnerabilities" listed in this so-called study do ship from Apple, many are third-party applications that just run on OS X. Also, OS X includes a lot of cool tools with their OS, because they are free. 99.99% of the time, these tools are never used, let alone exposed to the outside world.

Certainly, but it providing these applications as core part of their OS, surely Apple is in charge of the QA. If certain parts of the OS depend on this, then they should do the necessary QA. When a flaw is discovered they have two options, either get the latest patch from the module developers, or if it is not available work with them to ensure that a fix is provided. A bundled, but separate application does not follow the same rules, as it is usually described as non-essential addon.

For me this is like a car manufacturer, which discovers that the tires have a design flaw, after it gets to the customer. Sure it might not be directly their fault, but they are responsible for ensuring the fix gets to the customer. It doesn't matter if it is their problem or their suppliers problem, what matters is it gets to the customer.