Philip

Gordon Kelly vents over the recent Apple ads by using the “cold hard stats” of the “Symantec Internet Security Threat Report” for July - December 2006 to paint a picture that Windows is more secure than Mac OS X for getting a mere 4 mixed bag vulnerabilities without fully breaking down what kind they are and how severe they would be.

Reading the report:

Windows has an average patch time of 21 days for 39 vulnerabilities vs Mac OS X at 66 days for 43 vulnerabilities.
The break down for Windows was 12 high, 20 medium and 7 low. Mac OS X was 1 high, 31 medium and 11 low.
Interestingly, Windows patch response times rose from 13 days to 21 days, so if Gordon’s reading this, your “cold hard stats” show that Microsoft’s response times got worse from the first half of 2006. Don’t tell that to your readers, though. All vendors got worse response times as they spent longer fixing and patching, not surprising.

Symantec lists vulnerabilities as such here which defines Low, Medium and High. By my measure, 12 vs 1 high security vulnerabilities is nothing to sneeze at, we’re talking possible remote accessible root access, botnets or trojan installations via browsers here.

Browser wise, Internet Explorer leads the pack with 54 vulnerabilities, with Mozilla at 40, Safari and Opera at 4 each. I use Safari a lot (most Mac OS X users do, unless they upgrade to FireFox). So, basically the chance of getting infected from using the default browser under Windows (IE) is a lot higher than issues with Mac OS X (Safari) if you haven’t kept up to date.

Read the article here from Trusted Reviews.