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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.'"

6 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. this is no surprise... by thekm · · Score: 0, Troll

    ...if you need to patch your OS 100x more than a competitor, then you'll naturally be faster. If microsoft had an order or magnitude more bugs and was slower to fix them, then they'd be a far crappier tech company than they already are.

  2. Apple seems to put out more and more crap by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    I've recently noticed that Apples software constantly crash with segmentation faults which practically always means that there's a potential security vulnerability... So to me it seems like Apples code is constantly getting worse. It looks like sales is getting all the attention...

  3. It's to make up for the other 51 weeks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Of smug self rightous praise.

  4. *Yawn* by nikin · · Score: 0, Troll

    1. Who cares? 2. No one 3. How many viruses, trojans and other sundry malware attacks are successful against Mac OS X each year? Study THAT. Let's have something newsworthy, folks.

  5. Re:heh by mapsjanhere · · Score: 0, Troll

    Well, your description of Bush as "traitor in chief" probably did you in. What was an unnecessary flame bait since it didn't really add to your otherwise well stated post.

    --
    I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
  6. Thanks by DigitalisAkujin · · Score: 1, Troll

    Thanks for validating what the competent people have been saying all along.