Secunia: Apple makes the most vulnerable software in the market today
According to the Secunia Half Year Report 2010 report released recently, Apple makes the most vulnerable software available on the market today. Moreover, Secunia also made it clear that Apple software has constantly accounted for more security vulnerabilities than Microsoft’s.
The report shows an alarming development in 3rd party program vulnerabilities, representing an increasing threat to both users and business, which, however, continues to be greatly ignored.
This trend is supported by the fact that users and businesses still perceive the operating system and Microsoft products to be the primary attack vector, largely ignoring 3rd party programs, and finding the actions to secure these too complex and time-consuming.
Key highlights of the Secunia Half Year Report 2010:
- Since 2005, no significant up-, or downward trend in the total number of vulnerabilities in the more than 29,000 products covered by Secunia Vulnerability Intelligence was observed.
- A group of ten vendors, including Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, IBM, Adobe, and Cisco, account on average for 38 percent of all vulnerabilities disclosed per year.
- In the two years from 2007 to 2009, the number of vulnerabilities affecting a typical end-user
- PC almost doubled from 220 to 420, and based on the data of the first six months of 2010, the number is expected to almost double again in 2010 to 760.During the first six months of 2010, 380 vulnerabilities or 89% of the figures for all of 2009 has already been reached.
- A typical end-user PC with 50 programs installed had 3.5 times more vulnerabilities in the 24 3rd party programs installed than in the 26 Microsoft programs installed. It is expected that this ratio will increase to 4.4 in 2010.
The study also indicates that popular vendors are also subject to more scrutiny by the security community / researchers than less popular vendors; Oracle (including Sun Microsystems and BEA Logic) ranked #1 in four out of five years overtaken by Apple in the first half of 2010, with Apple consistently ranking higher than Microsoft.
Here are a few more findings of the report!
You can download and read the full Secunia Half Year Report 2010 PDF here.
The Secunia Personal Software Inspector is a free security tool designed to detect vulnerable and out-dated software and plug-ins which expose your otherwise updated & secure Windows computer to malicious attacks. You may want to check it out!
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