Jeff Jones, a security strategy directory for Microsoft, has published a report on the number of security vulnerabilities during Q1 of 2008 for workstation operating systems including Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X, Red Hat and Ubuntu. The results are surprising in that Vista had the least reported vulnerabilities while Mac OS X 10.5 had the most.
The report appears to have been carried out accurately by excluding packages in Linux to make it as comparable to Windows (e.g. excluding OpenOffice as Office is not included in a default Windows installation). It would be interesting to see more historical data to check if this was a particularly quiet quarter for Vista and XP, or if the data was true over a longer period. Certainly makes you question the perceived wisdom that Mac OS X or Linux is more secure than Windows.
