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.'"

Comments

Re:Well, duh...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly right. Microsoft batch their updates once a month. Apple do it less regularly and less frequently, and they are frequently *unbelievably* slow to patch issues in the Free software they ship that's also in Linux or BSD distributions (trust me, I track this stuff for my employer.) God only knows how bad they are about patches in their own code. They didn't even manage to fix a typo in the Safari / win32 port EULA right first time.

Personally as a certified Free software I'm rubbing my hands & looking forward to the Linux types who've switched for, basically, teh shiny. It's Freedom that counts folks, not features or functions or shiney... Freedom.