Microsoft Vista Has Fewer Flaws Than Other First-Year OSes

Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system brought home its first-year security report card today: Vista logged less than half the vulnerabilities that Windows XP did in its first year, according to the Microsoft report.

Report author Jeff Jones, security strategy director in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, compiled the number of vulnerability disclosures and security updates in Vista's first year, and compared them to Windows XP, Red Hat rhel4ws, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, and Apple Mac OS X 10.4 in their first years.

According to Jones, Vista came out ahead of all of the other first-year OSes: Microsoft released 17 security bulletins and patches affecting Vista, versus 30 for XP in its first year, for example. And Microsoft fixed 36 vulnerabilities in Vista, versus 65 for XP, according to the report. There are 30 vulnerabilities in Vista that have not yet been patched, and 54 for XP in its first year.

"The results of the analysis show that Windows Vista has an improved security vulnerability profile over its predecessor," Jones writes in his blog. "Analysis of security updates also shows that Microsoft improvements to the security update process and development process have reduced the impact of security updates to Windows administrators significantly compared to its predecessor, Windows XP."