Linux/Unix Vulnerabilities Outnumber Windows' 3 To 1

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Quoted from TechWeb:

Tallies kept by the U.S. government's computer security group show that Linux and Unix operating systems faced nearly three times the number of vulnerabilities in 2005 than did Microsoft's often-maligned Windows.

In the US-CERT (United Stated Computer Emergency Readiness Team) year-end vulnerability summary, Linux/Unix accounted for a whopping 2,328 vulnerabilities, about 45 percent of the 5,198 total.

Windows, on the other hand, sported just 812 vulnerabilities during the year, said US-CERT, or 16 percent of the total.

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My guess for this is that most of the Linux vulnerabilities are pretty small, whereas in Windows' case they are larger ones like the WMF Exploit - but I haven't really had time to look at CERT's end of year report.

Any observations are welcome :D

-jk

For reference, previous discussion around similar stats that kinda went leftfield... http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=273013

EDIT: haha my bad... here is the actual link:

http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=272975

I'm not entirely crazy... just mostly.

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The end-of-year vulnerability score should be taken with a grain of salt, however, since US-CERT doesn't filter out updates (so one actual vulnerability can be counted numerous times) nor does it break out individual vulnerabilities from warnings that cover multiple bugs (as in the many Mac OS X vulnerability listings). http://www.informationweek.com/

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That could help explain a bit of why.

As for the end of the year report, that's sure a heck of a lot of reading!

alleyCat - You've linked back to this thread... ;)

[edit] Did you mean this thread (although it is over 2 years old): http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=238446

Haha, yep, that cat sure did.

is there a big difference between a small exploit and a large exploit??

yea things like the WMF exploit are huge and easily exploitable... but against a skilled attacker.. i dont see how it would matter between a small exploit or a large one

doesnt keep me from feeling linux is better... not saying it IS..

just my thoughts

As for the end of the year report, that's sure a heck of a lot of reading!

Yep it is! That's why I think I'll carry on writing an article I'm working on instead... Oh, and thanks for that quote - helps clarify the topic a bit, but I still think it's a bit odd.

hex - I agree, but for the bunch of skiddies out there it is easier to exploit something as large as the WMF than a vulnerability in a remote service, for example. Oh, and don't get me wrong - just because this report has said that Linux has more vulnerabilities isn't going to change what I think about it either. :)

[edit] Where did Relyt's post go? :p

:D I posted a .bmp as an attachment, displaying MS as one of the sponsors of the site and it must have been too big because it got lost in the shuffle, so I went chasing it. Seems it dissappeared. Bill Gates conspiracy son of gun....lol. He stole my .bmp. I had completed some pretttty creative editing in paint as well.

Oh well, so it goes.

cheers

Wow... If I see one more of these threads I'm gonna flip... I'm not even going to state my oppinion on the matter because you can find what I've posted on 100's of these threads just by searching for them... Not to mention a big argument and flame war usually follows... I think nihil remembers that thread :)... The windows vs mac/linux thread I think it was...

...how much spyware/malware/virii are there for Linux? Is it in the hundreds of thousands yet?