Windows Vista was hit by significantly fewer publicly disclosed security flaws in its first year than Windows XP and open source rivals in their first years, according to a report from Microsoft. The report, written by Jeff Jones, a security strategy director in Microsoft"s Trustworthy Computing group, is part of Microsoft"s effort to show that its work on redesigning the security architecture and adding new security features to Vista have paid off.
Jones also found that changes to the way Microsoft handles patching has resulted in less work for system administrators on Vista compared to Windows XP. The report comes on the heels of figures from Secunia, which reported fewer vulnerabilities for Windows in 2007 compared to open source operating systems in the same time period. However, Microsoft"s report compares the way each OS fared in its first full year of supported distribution.