Apple's operating systems saw an increase in security vulnerabilities in 2014 and because of their severity, caused OS X and iOS to top the charts for 2014.
Over the years, Windows has consistently come under fire from security researchers for not being secure enough and having unpatched vulnerabilities. However, for the past few years, Microsoft has been taking security of its OS seriously and has released timely patches to protect users from threats; effectively dropping out of the top 3 vulnerable OSes list.
On the contrary, Apple's desktop and mobile operating systems have seen a rise in security vulnerabilities and the latest GFI report has revealed that majority of those are of high and medium severity. The Linux kernel has closely followed Apple in the top 3 as well, which can be attributed to some of the high profile security flaws such as the Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL and Shellshock, which affected Bash.
The report fails to mention the versions of Mac OS X or iOS, while all the currently supported Windows versions are listed separately with almost similar number of vulnerabilities for each of them. On the applications side, the picture is quite grim for Microsoft's Internet Explorer as it has nearly twice the vulnerabilities than those reported on the second positioned Google Chrome. The apps list is heavily dominated by Adobe software and other browser plugins.
Microsoft's upcoming OS could further reduce open vulnerabilities and the new "Spartan" browser engine sans the legacy code from IE might also usher in better security. Apple still needs to acknowledge its security shortcomings at a faster rate and release patches for users to avoid any major consequences.
Source: GFI | Images via GFI
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