2006 Operating System Vulnerability Summary

[Rich Tate]

This article is a summary of the vulnerabilities found in all operating systems in 2006. Keep in mind this list is only of known issues that appeared.

Computer security is a precarious business both from a product development and administrative standpoint. Operating system vendors are forced to constantly patch their software to keep consumers protected from the latest digital threats. But which operating systems are the most secure?

 

[Fooshnik]

That is a long article.

 

[bbz_Ghost]

Looks good for Vista, and that testing was done with the RTM build itself it seems. I bring up Vista because that's the new kid on the block, as it were, so it's nice to see that nothing extreme was noted in comparison to the other older more established OSes. And it's also nice to note that because of the concept of protecting the network stack with the software firewall during the boot process, not much gets through. In fact, they had to disable the firewall to get anything at all with Nmap:

"After disabling Vista's firewall, Nmap was able to identify three open ports for Windows networking and correctly fingerprinted the system Windows Vista."

I'd say that is absolutely fuckin' outstanding.

According to that data, Vista Ultimate (with firewall enabled, which is the default state of the firewall anyway) and Fedora Core 6 seem to be the only ones that after being updated if necessary (always a good thing anyway) offered either zero vulnerabilities that Nmap/Nessus could detect or were the least vulnerable of those tested.

Interesting...

 

[markt435]

good. plus it helps if you configure the firewall even more. but i'm honestly waiting for this to turn into some damn flame war like it usually does. so IN BEFORE THE LOCK...

/me exits as respective zealots come in

 

[Aelfgeft]

I was frankly amazed at how locked down FreeBSD appears to be. I may have to look into loading that on a spare rig one of these days and playing with it.