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Dec 18

2007 OS Vulnerabilities Scorecard: Windows 44 – Mac 243

George Ou over at ZDNet has crunched a lot of data and come up with some interesting results: Macs had substantially more vulnerabilities than Windows and most of the Mac flaws were “Highly Critical”.  His post details his source and how he came to his conclusions, including a list of every vulnerability. Here’s the rundown chart:

Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS X vulnerability stats for 2007
  XP Vista XP + Vista Mac OS X
Total extremely critical 3 1 4 0
Total highly critical 19 12 23 234
Total moderately critical 2 1 3 2
Total less critical 3 1 4 7
Total flaws 34 20 44 243
Average flaws per month 2.83 1.67 3.67 20.25

 There are currently several hundred comments on George’s post arguing the validity of his results, challenging inclusion of some of the flaws, and calling him an idiot.  I’ll make it REALLY easy for consideration here – I’ll ADD 50% to the Windows numbers and SUBTRACT 50% from the Mac numbers that gives us:

Windows: 66

Mac: 121

Well – Macs STILL have twice as many flaws in 2007 – and I think that was pretty generous of me. 

Here’s all I’m asking of the MacFanbois: Just drop the argument about how secure, flawless and Godlike Macs are – and then I’ll never mention again that even when extremely generous, Macs had twice as many flaws as Windows in 2007.

3 comments

  1. Tyler Jensen

    A quick count of the top ten most popular downloads at download.com for both OS’s reveals that Mac gets 2% of the love. Windows get’s 98%. Poor Mac people. Left out in the cold in the sofware world. Yikes! Maybe we should take up a collection for them.

  2. Joseph Scott

    I’m going to presume you didn’t even bother to look at the list of “Mac OS X” vulnerabilities. Just to see what this guy was talking about I clicked on the first three for OS X and they are:

    - Adobe Flash Player
    - tcpdump
    - PCRE

    It is a huge stretch (at best) to label these as Mac OS X vulnerabilities. After all, if you run these on your Windows/Red Hat/FreeBSD system you’ll have the same issues.

    And I’m definitely not in the camp that Mac OS X is perfect. Nor is any other OS. It is pretty clear that Larry Dignan was looking for attention though, which is exactly what you’ve done.

  3. Phil801

    Joseph – George made it clear through his post and his comments that he included anything that came with the default distro for the OS. That includes any software that is installed with the OS.

    Flash doesn’t come with WIndows, nor do the others. The ONLY thing I’m trying to point out is that Macs are not the ultimate solution that so many claim them to be – they are as flawed as any other OS.

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