Microsoft Security Chief Says Windows Safer Than Linux

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In a recent article from the EETimes Microsoft's security chief, Mike Nash, was quoted comparing the security of Windows to that of the Red Hat and SuSe Linux distributions. He said that "even with the relatively large number of bulletins we released this week, we compare favorably. Year-to-date for 2005, Microsoft has fixed 15 vulnerabilities affecting Windows Server 2003. In the same time period, for just this year, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 users have had to patch 34 vulnerabilities and SuSE Enterprise Linux 9 users have had to patch over 78 vulnerabilities."

While perhaps his defense is a bit predictable and his facts may be straight, he neglected to discuss the severity of the vulnerabilities. Comparing the security of operating systems based on the number of vulnerability patches is a poor way to compare the overall safety of an operating system. Perhaps the contributors of the open source community are working harder than the software engineers over at Microsoft.