The Myth of the Secure Apple OS

Talk to an Apple fanboy or girl, and chances are they’ll tell you the company’s Mac software is “better” than Microsoft’s — or anyone else’s for that matter. So there will be a few of them slinking around holding their heads in shame right now thanks to some research published recently by security company Secunia.

It turns out that of all the software vendors Secunia studied — and it looked at all the big boys including Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, Mozilla, Google, IBM and so on — the vendor with the most vulnerabilities in all its products was … you guessed it: Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL).

It’s ironic, really, when earlier this year Apple’s Steve Jobs refused to allow Adobe’s Flash on the iPhone or iPad, justifying the decision by calling Adobe lazy and saying: “Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy.” The words “pot,” “kettle” and “black” spring to mind.

Of course it’s true to say that bugs and vulnerabilities are not the same thing, and also that the raw number of vulnerabilities doesn’t give a precise indication of the relative overall security of a given vendor’s offerings. What we can say is that no one is perfect. Apple may be the least perfect of them all — at least when it comes to writing vulnerability-free code.

Read the rest at Serverwatch.