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Microsoft or Apple - Who Is the Faster Patcher?
Amy Bennett writes "And the answer is... Microsoft. Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology analyzed 658 high-risk and medium-risk vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft products and 738 affecting Apple. They measured how many times over the past six years the two vendors were able to have a patch available on the day a vulnerability became publicly known, which they call the 0-day patch rate. What they found: 'Apple was below 20 [unpatched vulnerabilities at disclosure] consistently before 2005,' said Stefan Frei, one of the researchers involved in the study. 'Since then, they are very often above. So if you have Apple and compare it to Microsoft, the number of unpatched vulnerabilities are higher at Apple.'"
...why is it Microsoft products that keep getting pwned?
And how many times can you cite that happening with MS patches? I can only think of a couple out of the hundreds of patches. No Apple update has every broken something? Sure they have and you know it.
Damn apologist self rigtheous zealots. It's really sad when otherwise smart people act with blind loyalty to a brand.
Quickly, everyone immediately jump to Apple's defense. Microsoft cannot possibly do anything right, and Apple cannot possibly do anything wrong. We must destroy this article like the piece of lying filth that it must be. My prejudices demand it!
Because Apple Mac OSX machines don't require patching. They are secure out of the box because they are built upon the superior Unix which has security designed in from the start. /snark
Well I have to give Microsoft for the award for the longest bug ever.
Excel still thinks 1900 is a leap year.
I cant see any other company with the arrogance and stupidity not to fix such a simple flaw.
Exactly the "yeah but" fanboyism that I was looking for!
Based on the fact that you scoured an article with the titile "US Mac Market share rises above 8.1%" to find a statistic that shows Apple does not make as many PCs + servers as the top 5 world wide vendors, I'll say you're being disingenuous.
PC market share has always been related in worldwide numbers to flatter Microsoft. Note that the Xbox, Zune and other products that have very little penetration outside the US are never compared to worldwide figures. Why not? Why are pundits working so hard to flatter Microsoft?
Back to reality: Apple holds enough market share in the markets that it participates in to have a presence that logically should expose some security threats. In retail laptop sales, Apple now has double digit market share. Apple doesn't have to have a significant percentage of the PC Server market (which is part of those worldwide PC market share numbers that Gartner/Microsoft like to advertise) in order to face security problems on the desktop. Because Apple has so little representation in the server market, its business is almost exclusively education and home/SOHO users, markets where it has a quite significant share of the market, and one that is growing. Yet we don't see Apple suffering from 10-25% of the malware out there.
If anything, the markets Apple participates in are at greater risk of casual malware threat. Who writes spyware aimed at attacking servers supervised by professional IT staff? Macs are a prime target for spyware/identity thieves, as the Mac user demographic tend to have more money to steal. The fact that Apple's installed base lies directly on top of the most attractive target for malware authors, yet has zero viruses and no significant real world malware problem says more about vulnerabilities than any amount of statistical bullshit churned out by people trying to bait links and suggest that up is down.
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