According to a
report published by the a top security firm GFI, it came to light the Apple’s Mac OS X and iOS tops the list of most vulnerable operating systems active around the world right now. The report shows that Apple’s Mac OS X has around 147
vulnerabilities from which 64 are having a very critical security impact.
The second on the list is another Apple’s operating system iOS with around 127 total vulnerabilities. From those 127 vulnerabilities around 32 will have a very severe security impact. 72 vulnerabilities are labelled as medium vulnerabilities because those will not create that sort of security impact.
|
Source: GFI |
There is a significant increase reported in the number of
vulnerabilities from last two years. 7,038 vulnerabilities in total were
added to NVD database in the year 2014 and 24% of them had severely
high-security impact.
Moreover, around 80% of the total vulnerabilities were sourced from
third-party applications and 4% vulnerabilities are generated from
hardware devices. Operating systems are responsible for remaining 13% of
vulnerabilities.
After analyzing the report we see that the three most secure operating systems around the world right now are Microsoft Windows 8.1 , Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Windows RT. The maximum number of
vulnerabilities of Microsoft Operating systems in the report are 38 which is a very impressive number when you compare them with the other operating systems.
|
Source: GFI |
The GFI also published the list of most vulnerable browsers that are used right now around the world. The top of the list was Internet Explorer, followed by Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. The number of vulnerabilities that Internet explorer has are 242, from which around 220 are rated has highly severe by the GFI.
While Google chrome and Mozilla Firefox has 124 and 117 vulnerabilities. Which is a pretty acceptable number when you compare them with the Internet Explorer. For the IT Admins if they are using these browsers in their respective organization it will make his network insecure. Report also added that IT admins should keep an close eye on the updates released by Operating systems, Web browsers, Java and Adobe free products. So their whole network will be safe from these vulnerabilities.
In an official statement released by the GFI the security firm said “2014 was a tough year for Linux users from a security point of view, coupled with the fact that some of the most important security issues of the year were reported for applications that usually run on Linux systems. Heartbleed, for example, is a critical security vulnerability detected in OpenSSL while Shellshock is a vulnerability that affects GNU Bash”