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Geekpedia » Tech News » Apple Behind Microsoft In Security Patches

Apple Behind Microsoft In Security Patches

On Tuesday, April 1st 2008 at 12:15 AM

By Andrei Pociu (View Profile)

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology analyzed the trend of Microsoft and Apple in patching security holes over the past six years and they kept logs of the 0-day patch rate, which looks at how often the two vendors patched a vulnerability the same day it became publicly known. So far 658 Microsoft vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft Windows and 738 affecting Mac OS X have been analyzed, all of medium or high risk.

Contrary to popular belief, Apple lagged well behind Microsoft at releasing security fixes, and for the past 3 years it has been constantly behind with over 20 unpatched vulnerabilities. Also, the total number of vulnerabilities and the percentage of attacks through these unpatched vulnerabilities has been higher and growing for Apple's software, according to SFIT.

The researchers suspect that Apple does not have as much interest in fixing patches as it does in protecting their public image, and are reluctant to frequently issue updates for their system at the cost of the consumers.

At a hacking contest last week held at the CansecWest conference, the Mac OS X machine was the first and only one to be hacked in the first stage of the contest, through a 0-day vulnerability.

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Current Comments

by Lindsay on Monday, April 14th 2008 at 11:17 PM

Check this out: http://media.arstechnica.com/news.media/syman4.jpg

This is coming from Symantec and they released a thick report on this. Microsoft is patching things up fastest, followed by Red Hat, HP, Apple and Sun. The difference is pretty big: Microsoft had an average of 6 days, Sun 157.