McAfee has made a dark prediction about the security delivered by Microsoft products this year. The security outfit's forecast comes at the end of the first three months of 2007. However, McAfee is also taking into consideration the beginning of April on the heels of this month patch cycle from Microsoft.

While the Redmond Company managed to skip March 2007 from its list of scheduled vulnerabilities releases, it more than made up for the last month's security updates sabbatical in April. As Symantec so carefully underlined, Microsoft had two Patch Tuesdays in April, and of course, the Cupertino-based security company is counting the update offered by Microsoft on April 3.

Monty Ijzerman, Manager of Security Content is the voice through which McAfee has expressed its predictions for Microsoft's security performance in 2007. "Now, let's do the numbers. We have added the number of vulnerabilities patched in 2007 to our graphs of last year. No surprise here. The graphs show that Microsoft is on track to at least equal the numbers of 2006. The sudden increase in number of patched vulnerabilities in June last year is still unexplained," Ijzerman revealed.

In fact, the graphics included at the bottom illustrate McAfee's perspective on the lack of security inherent with Microsoft's products. This prediction is crucial as Microsoft has made available Windows Vista, and concomitantly revealed that it expects its latest and most secure Windows platform to date to deliver only half the number of vulnerabilities of Windows XP.

McAfee emphasized that in 2006 alone, Microsoft patched a total of 133 Critical and Important vulnerabilities across its products.