Microsoft vs. Apple: The Zero-Days Patch Showdown?
My co-worker Steve sent me this tonight and I wanted to scrape some of it to display, I think this is just way too important to let get looked over because it’s not running on MSNBC.com or something….
Computerworld.com: Microsoft vs. Apple: Who patches zero-days faster?
Excerpt:
Apple’s teasing commercials that imply its software is safer than Microsoft’s may not quite match the facts, according to new research revealed at the Black Hat conference on Thursday.
Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology looked at how many times over the past six years the two vendors were able to have a patch available on the day a vulnerability became publicly known, which they call the 0day (zero-day) patch rate.
They analyzed 658 vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft products and 738 affecting Apple. They looked at only high- and medium-risk bugs, according to the classification used by the National Vulnerability Database, said Stefan Frei, one of the researchers involved in the study (PDF format).
What they found is that, contrary to popular belief that Apple makes more secure products, Apple lags behind in patching.
“Apple was below 20 [unpatched vulnerabilities at disclosure] consistently before 2005,” Frei said. “Since then, they are very often above. So if you have Apple and compare it to Microsoft, the number of unpatched vulnerabilities are higher at Apple.”
That just needs to be out there. Not that I am sucking up to my employer, but seriously folks, the idea that buying a Mac makes you not a virus target anymore is BS.
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