Seeing the security forest for the trees
Thank you, Joe Brockmeier and Joe Barr.
Over at NewsForge, the two writers point out that if you take US-CERT's annual summary of vulnerabilities at face value, you're likely to get the impression that Linux is lousy at security while Windows is great at it.
That's so wrong it would be funny, except some people -- including some journalists -- actually believe that Linux is less safe than Windows.
As the Joes point out: "Sheer number of vulnerabilities means little when compared with other factors, such as the severity of the vulnerability, how easy it is to exploit the vulnerability, and how long it takes a vendor to respond to the vulnerability."
Exactly.
I might add that since Linux is open source, its developers talk about its problems all the time -- usually while fixing them!
Windows is a black box. When something goes wrong, no one, except the cracker who's making use of the hole, may know about it.
In addition, proprietary software problems can go unpatched for months.
That's not pro-Linux talk, that's just the way it is.
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