A little article at Windows IT Pro claims to have the results of a new study that proves Linux is the least secure OS:
According to a study the British security firm mi2g, Linux is the world’s “most breached” OS and is exploited more frequently than Windows. The company recently analyzed more than 235,000 successful attacks against computers that were permanently connected to the Internet during the past year and concluded that Linux was responsible for most of the successful exploits.
“For how long can the truth remain hidden, that the great emperors of the software industry are wearing no clothes fit for the fluid environment in which computing takes place, where new threats manifest every hour of every day?” DK Matai, mi2g’s executive chairman, said in a statement. “Busy professionals … don’t have the time to cope with umpteen flavors of Linux or to wait for Microsoft’s Longhorn when Windows XP has proved to be a stumbling block in some well-chronicled instances.”
To which I say, puh-leeze. I’m a Windows guy, but I’m not a hack, and this “study” just smells to the high heavens of hackery.
I’d love to check out the details so I could decide for myself, but the good folks at Windows IT Pro apparently decided that it wasn’t important to provide a link to the original study or to any information about the consulting firm behind the report. In fact, there are no links in this story at all except for the fake links inserted by the execrable Vibrant Media, which lead directly to ads, not real content.
Lame, lame, lame.
A quick Google search leads to a wealth of information about mi2g, much of it unflattering. Like this little blurb from Attrition.org.
You can find the mi2g press release on which the Windows IT Pro article was based here.
For the record, I think security problems in Windows are consistently overstated, especially for server versions, and security problems in Linux are probably understated on average. But articles like this one don’t add to the debate; they just give the /. crowd a big, fat, legitimate target.
Ed Bott 