Thursday, January 24, 2008

Microsoft Vista One Year Vulnerability Report

Vista logged fewer vulnerabilities in its first year than XP, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Apple Mac OS X did in their first years

Jeff Jones has just released a pdf, Windows Vista One Year Vulnerability Report. I’m still digging into the report, but I like how he’s shown a side by side comparison between the number of vulnerabilities XP had at one year versus the number Vista has had at one year.

A number that would be more revealing, but that we’re not going to see, would be the number of open, unpatched vulnerabilities in each system today. That would tell us a lot more about how secure we are, which is really what we really want to know. I think Jeff does a very good job of comparing apples to apples in the report, but it doesn’t do much to prove that as of today, Windows Vista is the most secure OS available.

I’m still not upgrading to Vista until I can make sure the 64-bit drivers exist for all of my hardware. Even if Vista is as secure as Jeff asserts, it’s not enough to make the upgrade worthwhile to me.

Download PDF Report.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Shoaib,
it is interesting to me to see the discussions around Vista. A lot of people are telling me that Vista is not stable or that drivers are not available. Well, to a certain extent this is true. I migrated quite some PCs during the last 12 months and my father really had a problem with a printer-driver. This was the only problem I had so far and there were quite some 64-bit systems among that. I would start to consider migrating and profiting of the beautiy and security of Vista :-)
Roger

Shoaib Yousuf said...

Hi Roger,

As you said:

A lot of people are telling me that Vista is not stable or that drivers are not available. Well, to a certain extent this is true.

I agree with you. I would really like to see Businesses start taking initiative in migrating to Windows Vista and making it standard OS. Only problem i see in that is they are alot of production applications which many businesses uses on regular basis need to go through testing procedure to get sign off to use on Windows Vista , which i guess will take a little while.

I have vista on my testing laptop and i am really enjoying it.

Cheers

Shoaib