14 DAY TRIAL // In the aftermath of the Windows Animated Cursor Handling vulnerability impacting a range of products of the Windows platform, Windows Vista is yet again applauded as the most secure operating system for the past three months. According to a report made available by Jeff Jones, a Security Strategy Director in Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing group, Windows Vista has managed to top Linux and Mac OS X in December 2006, January and February 2007 in terms of code quality.
And while Microsoft is going head over heels laboring to make available an out of band security patch on April 3, designed to resolve the critical vulnerability in Windows Animated Cursor Handling, Jones is praising Windows Vista as the most secure operating system on the market. This although the .ANI files vulnerability also impacts Windows Vista and the severity rating is also Critical.
"The first chart represents the total High, Medium and Low severity issues fixed for the various products over the past 3 months, ending in February 2007. Examining the 3-month chart, we see that Windows Vista had the lowest number of total and High severity vulnerabilities fixed. Mac OS X also had a low number of vulnerabilities fixed in the 3 month period," Jones revealed.
The graphics available herein represent the vulnerabilities that have impacted workstation operating systems. Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Workstation (rhel4ws), Ubuntu 6.60 LTS and Novell SLED10 are the workstations subjected to the comparison. The second graphic reveals a comparison of the volume of resolved vulnerabilities across the operating systems mentioned above, but this time only from January 1, 2007 to February 28, 2007.
