Windows reckoned more secure than OS-X

Funny - if you read through the comments - you can tell the fan boys responded to the headline without reading the article. "Think different"? - well, fan boys all sound the same to me.. One individual doesn't seem to realize it's not INQ who wrote this. 

By actually reading the report you'd see ZDnet has credible statistics and they have a valid point. They aren't "attacking" your beloved personal computer. Some Apple users are both militant and sensitive which I just can't understand. Any critical reporting is immediately lashed out at with "So There! You Suck!" types of comments.

The only reason that no viruses hit OS X is because nobody ever writes one for the platform. It's kinda like games but even more so. Apples are definetely more secure but that's only due to the fact that the user base is so small - not because there are no holes. If it was secure they wouldn't be patching it all the time. As Apple's marketshare increases the likelyhood someone exploits the OS increases.

So I take it this means that Microsoft has not been sitting on any security holes?? 


I'm shocked that you managed to say something good about Vista without sneaking something bad in, or taking at shot at it... 

And i'm not at all surprised Windows is more secure than Mac. Well more secure yet less secure, as all the virus creators never bother targeting Macs as the user base is so low.

Windows is much more secure than OS-X. Logical really when you consider that windows spends so much time either BSing or being updated that its sheer unavailabilty makes it immune to attacks.

like the title said, there isn't any virus for vista either.

And vistas probably already have more market share than mac os x.

Only apple maniac fools by their "most advance operating system" scheme. The fact is that it seems that way because of apple bad business practices such as lying, deleting post, etc, etc

I myself have a macbook. I have a gaming PC that I built also and when it comes down to it the number one cause of an intrusion or infection is the user.
I have Linux, OSX, and Vista, none of which I have had any malware.

The fact is that with all these systems it boils down to how fast, from discovery, to patch, to testing, to release goes. 

I also beleive that the updater in OSX is like in Linux where your 3rd party programs get their patches too. Do not know if that would skew the numbers at all.

Vista is far more secure than xp. Even if you do acidentely download a virus on Vista the likely hood of it running is much lower. 

I backed up a friends computer to my external drive while i was running Vista, he told me it had no viruses and I was stupid and or busy enought to forget to check.

Well Vista was fine, my virus checking checks new processes as they start,, expecially things coming from external drives. 

Well when the RC2 of vista went to RTM I got myself XP MCE with free upgrade to vista home premium. 

As soon as I got it set up and the anti virus installed, i plugged in my external to get more programs off of it..... virus warning one after the other started popping up.

So I shut er down ... Put a live linux cd in nuked my friends files which he already got back.... called him... told him that he really did have viruses on his hard drive..... nuked xp install and started over.

I am now back on vista and loving it...no its perfectly stable....I admit not the first three weeks... but after the driver companeis got their act together and made new drivers im cool. realtec and nvidia were the drivers listed to my BSOD ..


Well no crashes since then....I didched Nvidia for ATi and im great,,,

Vista rocks....but do yourself a favor and tweak the running processes ... cmon a desktop doesnt need wireless config running.


So yes I believe Vista (windows is more secure) but still more prone to virus attacks as it is a larger base to attack.)

I don't think that the author's have much to worry about. The most that would happen to them is some whining or hair pulling.

In 12 years of intensive working with Macs, I have never seen a virus. My wife, who uses a PC, has had countless viruses. Vista may very well be better than OS X, but in real terms it still seems unlikely that I will get a virus - so what's the benefit?

" blah blah blah, wake me when a real exploit has affected OSX. How many spambots run off OSX? How many people have had their OSX boxes compromised? EXACTLY. zip zero zilch nada."

hey faggot, how many people own OSX boxes? thank you.

Great investigative reporting, Inq! All of the cited vulnerabilities are in third party software. In view of the paucity of worms and viruses targeting the OS, Mac OS X remains the most secure OS.

blah blah blah, wake me when a real exploit has affected OSX. How many spambots run off OSX? How many people have had their OSX boxes compromised? EXACTLY. zip zero zilch nada.

Yesterday I finished a customer's Vista virus cleaning. He bought the machine a couple months back. He had used the programs Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D to remove viruses. This resolved his problem. He had the spysherriff malware app. What it did was modify his registry so that he couldn't change the desktop wallpaper back from the one spysheriff put on it.

Upon investigation I found a site that covered registry tweaks and they pointed to the policy editor. Unfortunately the lesser versions of Vista don't come with it so the registry modification had to be done by hand. I'm sure this is what Microsoft had intended. 

Customer's who paid this money for their computer are not going to pay more to have their version of Windows upgraded. Basically it meant customers have to clean up the registry hacks done by malware by hand. I'm sure there are apps out there that deal with this but the customer is an average person not a computer expert.

So, I made the changes. Had to test. Spent way too much time on this.

Anyway, when I interviewed him about what he had done he said he had done nothing. He didn't install anything. He didn't go to a website that he shouldn't have visited. Essentially it showed up but not in a way that he acknowledged knowing about. Highly illegal.

I checked to see if he had the updates installed. He had the vast majority of Microsoft's updates installed. There were only a few that hadn't been done because they were new.

The bottom line is this. This is Vista. This guy's son works at Microsoft. He was infected by doing nothing that he believed was questionable. Upon checking the programs that were installed there were no unusual programs after the cleaning. 

So, how in hell can Vista be more secure than OSX when all a person has to do is visit some website and he becomes infected with some of the worst malware (and then has to clean up the registry so he can get the OS to perform the basic tasks that a user would want to perform)?

Quote: This will almost certainly get a flood of anonymous emails from Apple Fanboys who will shout about how there are no viruses for Leopard.

You hope. Happy trolling.

He is just arguing the fact that Apple claims their operating system is more secure than windows which is a lie and gives its users a false sense of security. There will be viruses etc for macs, its inevitable, its only a matter of when not if. Unlike windows there will be little if anything to stop them because very few mac users are taking steps to protect their computer because they think they don't have to.

Someone did just great job evaluating security by counting number of flaws.
It is like saying: our car is great have only one problem- wheels can fell off... 
While in competitor's car there are many problems: ashtray can be stuck, seats does not recline completely, etc.

OK, I'm no expert, but I selected three of the listed CSVs at random. Not one affected the OSX that you or I use.

One was just "reserved", didn't even have a case for it; one was the duplicate of another, also in the list, and the third affected an app I had never heard of : Ruby on Rails. Apparently it can be used on OS X Server. Which, hmm, is what % of OS X use?

So, three strikes and "yur out!'

The article follows the slant of the popular OS market share survey: if it suits your bias, use it. (The survey lists OS X (PPC) and OS X (Intel) as two different operating systems, like XP and Vista. Isn't that a hoot??)

You know what?
I think I'm going to start acting likeTom Potts and Henry. Wearing such an attitude, peeps are going to hate me - this will then generate some more bad press over Apple fanboism.

Those peeps are hated in every forums - Even their owns! Never say you have a problem with your beloved Mac, otherwise, you'll get lynched.

Let's help them being hated.

Mac users are already defending their precious os. What guys like 'Sulis' don't understand is that a virus is not always something that crashes your os. A virus writer may very well use a exploit to get to private data without infecting the computer permanently. He can steal passwords, pictures, documents, ... from your Mac and you won't even know.

so what is better someone with the skill to do what they want in your computer? or some script kiddie limited by the command of the scripts?

Amazed (though not really) you swallowed this without looking at what's in the glass. MacOSX (all five editions) gets aggregated and Windows gets seperated out into only the two most recent. There is nary a bit of analysis about the actual risk of the exploit and potential damage, on either side. Nor is there a mention of how long the vulnerabilities were available before being patched. The idiot who writes your teasers refers to the Mac OS X vulnerabilities as "juicy" without a shred of evidence of which ones he or she is talking about, nor even what they mean by that term. Bottom line - your reporting isn't reporting at all - it's just stupid. How about adding to the knowledge next time instead of thrashing about and drooling?

Your article is corrector WOOO. Also I have noticed that the NASA missions to the Moon have not happened, it all happened in a warehouse in Arizona. Wibble wibble. My television is on the fritz I think it's the aliens. My PC that BSOD's every day and gets infected with anything that moves if I connect it to tinternet is much more secure as I am always reinstalling the OS. My OSX which has never once in six years experienced malware of any kind is obviously the more dangerous system, it's WIDE OPEN and WOOOO the only dead computer is the one that's never been dead WOOO I am descended from the lizard gods.

The only thing that matters is that Vista is more secure than XP. Why is everyboy talking about macintosh? What marketshare do they have? 5%, laughable, I don't even know why they are in the test.

Mac users will reply. You hope. Happy trolling.

Vista already has issues doing basic OS stuff, so you can forget about malware ! By the time Vista can run a virus, you'll already be dead anyway.

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/12/21/vista-vs-mac-os-x-security-why-george-ous-zdnet-vulnerability-numerology-is-absurd/

http://www.crn.com/software/199701019

You keep getting the same lie OS upgrade after OS upgrade & still you believe....Hey what's that on your shirt?

The reason windows is better than OS X is because of one reason:

Windows has fare more apps and games

Go ask a mac user what he uses his mac for and you'l get a responce like "well i use photoshop and iMovie" - Great fantastic..

Ask a Windows user what he uses his PC for and the posibilitys are endless.

Think of it this way back in the old format VHS vs Betamax war who won? VHS did, why? Because they had the porn industry, it didnt matter that betamax was the better format they had porn.

Think of applications and games like porn, they keep you busy for hours like porn can, now what would you rather go and buy? A computer that can play porn or a computer that cant.

Exactly.

Amusingly, apparently advisories in software that can be used on Mac OS X (i.e. Flash) count as Mac OS X advisories, but not as Windows advisories, despite being cross-platform. Also, while Vista advisories and XP advisories are broken up into their respective operating system versions, ALL versions of Mac OS X are aggregated together, including server-specific advisories.

Also, ZDNet's statistics disagree with Secunia's (despite using Secunia for data):

http://secunia.com/product/96/?task=statistics_2007 shows only 26 advisories from 2007. Again, these 26 are an aggregation of advisories for multiple versions of Mac OS X; primarily 10.4.x.

If one truly wants to compare security, a MUCH better metric would be comparing the amount of time until an advisory is patched, and if there are exploits in the wild. However, since there are no Mac exploits in the wild, and Microsoft can easily be demonstrated as being slower to patch vulnerabilities, the shills at ZDNet can't push their blogs with facts, merely skewed statistics.

Also...I don't see anyone commenting on the fact that ALL the "Extremely Critical" advisories are for Windows.

There's already malware for Vista; where's the in-the-wild Mac malware, if Mac OS X is so insecure? Recent usage statistics show more people run Mac OS X than Vista. So if you trot out the "It's more of a target because more people use it." logic, there'd be malware for Mac before Vista, right? Wrong.

I use Leopard, but Vista would be great if it would just 'shut up.'

For full time computer use, I'd rather be using Leopard simply because the OS doesn't ask me questions every day and it doesn't notify me with horribly annoying, repetitive balloon pop-ups every time something fantastically insignificant happens.

"you just plugged in a USB device"
"You just unplugged a USB device"
"It is now safe to remove this USB device"
"Your computer is not protected. Click here to solve this problem."
"Would you like to turn on Automatic Updates now?
Would you?
Would you?
Would you?"

'ack.'

They're nothing but a bunch of windows fanboys spreading FUD! When was the last time a Mac got infected by an audio CD? With Windows, several of the DVD's I put in throw spam at me. Personally, I consider that a huge security flaw.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! WIND BLOWS more secure than Unix based OS X! Yeahhhhhhh, right! Can you say Microsoft propaganda? Can you say Wind BLOWS AND SHIT SHOWS! HAHA!!!!!!!!!! Man, you freaking 95 percentile Windows World users are extremely vulnerable to my hacking skills. I got trojans they don't even detect! You ain't got a chance in hell when it comes to security and OS X! I'll show you what it's like to your WIND BLOWS be port fucked by my Apple computer. I hack Wind BLOWS users all the time with my HACKINTOSH! Windblows is easy to hack. Microsoft Propaganda. Don't ya know!? If you own a WIND BLOWS machine you're just a follower of the New World Order! You're just another BUM on the BLOCK! You ain't GOT TASTE! You're a bum, and you deserved to get HACKED BY ME ON MY HACKINTOSH! Got a few fine trojans for ya and a dandy batch of spyware, and some of your progs on WIND BLOWS can't even detect it! My port scanner been roam'n your files! All ya got is those mp3s and some dirty pictures! Ya'll sick suckers! Wind Blows users a perverted mass of men and women! You get'n on that camera having cam sex! You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Gonna bring ya to your knees MIcorosft world! You ain't got a chance! APPLE PIE IS THE SWEETEST IN THE MORN'N!

One thing i can say after switching to mac. I don't regret it. I love it because it works. I don't have to fiddle with system to make it work faster when it slows down. I never suffered from any "threat" on OS X and im not running AV. And if Windows more secure then OS X – you stay there and good luck!