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Re:Was Mac OS X really the most vulnerable in 2015? by Terretta on Saturday January 09, 2016 @12:32PM (#10872035)
“Apple, it turns out, had 91 vulnerabilities of this [very severe] severity in 2015, a mere 14 percent of their total vulnerabilities. Microsoft, however, had 332 very severe vulnerabilities, at 58 percent of their total. Adobe leads both with a whopping 389 very severe vulnerabilities, almost 85 percent of their total.”

“This tells us more clearly about the severity of the vulnerabilities in the data, which is a more important metric than just how many total vulnerabilities there are.”

Re:Was Mac OS X really the most vulnerable in 2015? by nolok on Saturday January 09, 2016 @01:11PM (#10872192)
In other words, if you look by product - which you should, yes, Mac OS X was the most vulnerable OS. IF you look by company total, no Apple wasn't.

And if you even ignore type of product, then Adobe goes first, but this has no impact on "which OS was the most vulnerable".

Re:Was Mac OS X really the most vulnerable in 2015? by zepto on Saturday January 09, 2016 @01:27PM (#10872252)
No.

Firstly the data aren't usable for this kind of analysis even if you bucket them differently: https://www.cvedetails.com/how-does-it-work.php

Secondly, we know nothing about exposure, because we don't know how the relative levels of attention or how quickly the vulnerabilities are patched.

A high discovery rate is as indicative of the attention given to the platform as it is to the underlying number of vulnerabilities. A high discovery rate plus relatively high rate of distribution of patches could means a system is less vulnerable.

I'm not saying this is the case - just that the data presented are simply useless for ranking software vulnerability levels.

Re:Was Mac OS X really the most vulnerable in 2015? by awakeasleep on Saturday January 09, 2016 @01:24PM (#10872240)
Another thing that would add more information to the picture is something like "percent of installbase running vulnerable version."

If, for example, researchers found 10k vulnerabilities in windows 3.1, it wouldn't make sense to ding microsoft for an insecure operating system, because no one runs that and it's not reasonable to expect support.

Re:Was Mac OS X really the most vulnerable in 2015? by krylon on Saturday January 09, 2016 @03:11PM (#10872679)
> because no one runs that and it's not reasonable to expect support.

I would not be overly surprised if it turned out somebody was still using Windows 3.1 - I know of at least one company still running NT 4 on at least a few select machines. (This does not invalidate your point, though.)

Re:Was Mac OS X really the most vulnerable in 2015? by highmastdon on Saturday January 09, 2016 @06:56PM (#10873423)