Visit the Windows Desktop forum section for support and help with Microsoft's new operating system A lighter version of OSNN best suited for PDAs and phones capable of browsing HTML The infamous OSNN forums containing many technical and non-technical sections! Run Folding@Home as part of Team OSNN / SP / NVNews



OS X is world's most secure operating system
Posted by Jewelzz on the 2nd November 2004 at 6:02pm 13 comments

Mac OS X and BSD Unix have been named as the world's safest and most secure online computing environments after a year-long study by enterprise security specialists mi2g.

In what is describes as 'the most comprehensive study ever undertaken', mi2g's Intelligence Unit analysed over 235,000 security breaches against permanently online systems and found that Mac OS X or BSD (on which OS X is partly based) accounted for just 4.82 per cent of all successful attacks. Linux was the least secure, with 65.64 per cent while Windows accounted for most of the remainder.

In Government environments, where breaches should be treated with the utmost concern, the positions of Windows and Linux are reversed, due in no small part to a succession of worms and trojans directed against Microsoft's OS.

PC Pro


Comment posted by TheToast at 7:17pm on the 2nd November 2004   
A nice reminder but nothing I didn't already know. OS X is fantastic. I haven't plugged in my PC in a week today. I'm operating 100% off my iBook now. It can do absolutely anything I need except burn DVDs since it's the 12" and not the 15" with the superdrive Smilie

OS X and included applications are way WAY better than Windows. Words can't describe it -- you gotta try it to know it.
 
Comment posted by Tuffgong4 at 7:31pm on the 2nd November 2004   
I think that OS X is very secure but the amount of people who own run windows dwarfs the amount that run OS X and if you reverse it so that the amount of people that were running windows were running OS X the amount of viruses and security would be the the same as windows...it's all about opportunity. Hackers can find a hole in anything it just matters on what they have the opportunity to work with
 
Comment posted by LordOfLA at 8:58pm on the 2nd November 2004   
So then explain why windows accounted for less security breaches then linux Smilie

BSD is jsut as prevalent as windows in places where security matters, whereas most linux security breaches are redhat/fedora servers rented by your average joe that thinks he knows alot from datacentres, and thus are easilly penetrated.
 
Comment posted by Geffy at 12:02am on the 3rd November 2004   
BSD is the bestest ever!!!!
 
Comment posted by Petros at 3:26pm on the 4th November 2004   
They are wrong! The most secure OS is the one I wrote for my robot espresso maker. Zero viruses to date.
 
Comment posted by ShepsCrook at 4:09am on the 5th November 2004   
See what you are failing to recognize, is that they took a singular computer with each operating system and attacked it. They didn't do a calculation of amount of users as the percentage with these security leaks. So dwarfing of an OS is not the issue here.

But yes, if you took any operating system and put it in the most popular ones place, you would find that tons more people would be working out ways to break it, create holes, and find holes.
 
Comment posted by ming at 12:23pm on the 5th November 2004   
yep... they probably didn't weigh it at all. eg. how do you balance it when there's like 1000 windows users to every 1 OSX user?
 
Comment posted by Joe Fuentes at 4:57am on the 23rd July 2005   
The text was good, but i stil cant find the play ipdates. looking for it dude.
 

osnndotnet limited | 2001 - 2009