Microsoft's Security Woes - Answered
Recently a LinkedIn member commented on one of my posts with "...same lack of security Microsoft is known for." I thought this would be a great topic to discuss, so here it is. Thank you fellow LinkedIn member for this idea.
Let's clear up this misconception of Microsoft not being secure. I also would like to note that this is not to advocate for Microsoft, but to educate where vulnerabilities lie. In the past, yes Microsoft have been very poor in security, it was not a very big concern. Heck, with Windows XP, it didn't matter if you used uppercase and lowercase letters in your passwords; Windows XP basically saved your passwords in uppercase.
In the last 5 years, Microsoft have not been the #1 Software vendor with security vulnerabilities. Check out the numbers below to see for yourself:
You can see that Apple & Microsoft are head to head in the number of vulnerabilities. Note, we are comparing apples and oranges because Microsoft has 409 products vs Apple's 106 products. The next chart will only compare the vulnerability only Operating Systems alone. Apple's Mac OS & iOS vs Microsoft's Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1, Windows 10 & Windows RT. The numbers are surprising.
It is obvious that Apple has 1 major advantage, they force users to keep their operating systems up-to-date. Microsoft is a little slow to adapt to this, they have several versions out and it is difficult to manage them. I can tell you that Microsoft's end goal is to follow the same model. Everyone will eventually on the same operating system all the time. This will clearly reduce the number of vulnerabilities they have greatly.
Why can't they just have 0 vulnerabilities? Simple, security affects usability. If their platforms are 100% secure, the feature sets and usability of the products will more than likely be useless. Apple, Android & Microsoft have this problem...calculating security risks vs usability of their products. And of course it is nearly impossible to secure 50,000,000 - 100,000,000 lines of software code. That is equivalent to 1 million - 2 million pages. If you were to stack the sheets of paper vertically, it would be over 27 - 55 stories tall. That is a lot to read, comprehend and analyze.
The lesson to be learned here is that security doesn't just lie on one software provider but all providers including the end-users. Just like a car/truck/SUV, everything has to be maintained and updated regularly.
Make sure you update all of your software, operating systems, firewall/router firmware and even printers regularly.