Sat, 21 Feb 2004

The Most Secure Operating System

Spotted this link over at Secular Blasphemy today, concerning a report (via Ars Technica) from a British security consultant on the number of attacks on various operating systems.

The study reports Linux as having more attacks than Windows. This is a somewhat distored result, especially if you read between the lines.

First off, this study only counts active "hack attacks" over the Internet, not virii and worms. Were the latter included, Windows would have led by a wide margin. Secondly, the study fails to take into account the dominance of Linux in webserver space, which is the most visible (and hence attackable) space on the net.

The report does make a good point:

However, the sharp rise in Linux breaches probably reflects a lack of training and deployment expertise rather than inherent security problems within Linux, mi2g officials suggested.

Finding a good sysadmin is always a tough job, no matter what the system.

Finally, most of the Windows folks quoting this piece today seemingly missed the last paragraph:

According to the study, the most secure OS turned out to be BSD (Berkley Software Distribution) and Mac OS X.

But perhaps most damning is the history of the company, mi2g, making the report. Curiously, their website runs Apache on Linux, according to NetCraft. See also this page from TechDirt reporting their attempts to sue folks who had the teremity to point out their past attempts to overhype virus alerts and their security expertise.

In short, I wouldn't take all of this too seriously. I think mi2g threw this up to get some publicity, and by golly, it worked!

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