14 DAY TRIAL // If the operating systems were a pack, Windows Vista would be the alpha male. But as far as Linux and Mac OS X are concerned, Windows Vista is top dog and nothing else. At least this is the claim of Jeff Jones, a Security Strategy Director in Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing group.
Jones has compared the code quality of Windows Vista, Windows XP Service Pack 2, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Workstation (rhel4ws), Ubuntu 6.60 LTS, Novell SLED10 and Mac OS X 10.4. You will be able to see the results of his comparison in the graphic included at the bottom of this article. The most recent comparison of fixed vulnerabilities across the operating systems mentioned above has been summed up in the March 2007 - Operating System Vulnerability Scorecard. However, Jones has also authored the January 2007 - Operating System Vulnerability Scorecard, February 2007 - Operating System Vulnerability Scorecard and the Windows Vista - 90 Day Vulnerability Report. Windows Vista follows the same trend of being top dog in all mentioned reports.
"The chart represents the total High, Medium and Low severity issues fixed for the various products over the past 3 months, ending in March 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, which had a low values on the February scorecard surged upward due to patches released in March," Jones revealed.
However, Jones has missed a vital part of information, and he has also failed to update the Windows Vista 90 Day Vulnerability Report in accordance to the recently made public critical vulnerability in Windows Animated Cursor Handling. The .ANI file vulnerability was discovered and reported to Microsoft by Determina back on December 20, 2006. And along with it, as part of the update building process, via triaging, Microsoft identified other six vulnerabilities. However, a patch was only released on April 3, 2007.
