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More Mac Vulnerabilities Than Windows In 2007?
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Dec 18, 2007 02:24 PM
from the dogs-and-cats-living-together-mass-hysteria dept.
from the dogs-and-cats-living-together-mass-hysteria dept.
eldavojohn writes "A ZDNet blog reports stats from Secunia showing OSX averaged 20.25 vulnerabilities per month while XP & Vista combined averaged 3.67/month. Is this report card's implication accurate, or is this a symptom of one company turning a blind eye while the other concentrates on timely bugfixes? 'While Windows Vista shows fewer flaws than Windows XP and has more mitigating factors against exploitation, the addition of Windows Defender and Sidebar added 4 highly critical flaws to Vista that weren't present in Windows XP. Sidebar accounted for three of those additional vulnerabilities and it's something I am glad I don't use. The lone Defender critical vulnerability that was supposed to defend Windows Vista was ironically the first critical vulnerability for Windows Vista.'"
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Vulnerability Numerology - Defective by Design? 103 comments
rdmreader writes "RDM has a point by point disassembly of the security vulnerability story phenomenon. We regularly see these, comparing various vulnerability lists for different operating systems. ZDNet's George Ou, for example, condemns Linux and Mac OS X by tallying up reported flaws and comparing them against Microsoft's. What he doesn't note is that his source, Secunia, only lists what vendors and researchers report. Results selectively include or exclude component software seemingly at random, and backhandedly claims its data is evidence of what it now tells journalists they shouldn't report. Is Secunia presenting slanted information with the expectation it will be misused?"
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/. Windows bashing makes me want to throw a chair (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:News Flash: nothing has changed (Score:5, Informative)
Well, here's my token sound bite too...
MIcrosoft is the party guilty of underreporting vulnerabilities, including undocumented patches in updates - how much more obscure can you get?! On the other hand show me a significant linux virus or OS X exploit being used in the wild. Well? Where are they? Waiting.....Parent
Re:News Flash: nothing has changed (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:News Flash: nothing has changed (Score:5, Informative)
But your right, many old school hackers will exclusively target unix machines because they are simply more useful from their perspective. People typically only target windows machines to run a particular program (their bot) which has a fixed set of built in capabilities. Gaining access to a shell gives someone far more scope, and makes it much easier to deploy new malicious code.
You will rarely get an attacker interactively connecting to a hacked windows system to do something, but this is common with compromised unix systems. When a windows box is compromised, it's typically by an automated process which will install a bot and move on to the next host. Automated attacks are less common on unix, partly also because of the increased diversity of unix systems.
Parent
Counting shows nothing (Score:5, Informative)
Shouldn't Slashdot link to some more insightful analysis?
Re:Counting shows nothing (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Counting shows nothing (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Counting shows nothing (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Counting shows nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely. Vulnerability counts are worthless. Here's the simplest example I can think of:
My friend and I both maintain a tool of some sort. We both get ten security vulnerability reports sent to us each year. I patch ten security bugs ten minutes after they are reported and my friend sits on the first ten bugs for a year, then the next year, we both fix ten vulnerabilities in the second year. However, for a user that keeps their system patched, I have an average of slightly over zero exposed vulnerabilities, while my friend's software exposes slightly over ten. According to the vulnerability count, however, I had 20 and my friend had 10.
Parent
Re:Counting shows nothing (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Your friends flaws only allowed an administrator of the systm, on the local system to accidentally delete (but not read or otherwise modify) secur data of the users.
2) Your flaws allowed anyone to connect to the machine remotely and read/write/modify all of the secure data on the server.
Which is worse? It's severity and time of exposure. MacOS X didn't have any extremely critical vulnerabilities, but Windows had four, MacOS X had a lot more highly critical, and slightly more moderately/less critical. This makes the vulnerability count look even less meainingful (if every level counts 100x more than the previous level in terms of overall risk, and the average fix time was the same, Windows would be more vulnerable than MacOS X, even with only 15% the bug count.)
Parent
Re:Counting shows nothing (Score:5, Informative)
Any exploit that occured in both XP and Vista was only counted once for the total, not twice.
Just as any exploit that occured in both OS X.4 and X.5 was counted once, not twice.
As long as he did the same thing on both operating system pairs, it's ok. Though he should have given a breakdown of the X.4 and X.5 bugcounts as well.
Parent
Re:Counting shows nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, the way they rate vulnerabilities seems to be different. Microsoft "Highly critical" vulnerabilities seem to all be remote arbitrary code, and "Less critical" can be remote DoS, whereas "Highly critical" on OS X seems to sometimes include DoS. Infact, CVE-2007-4702 (less critical) doesn't even seem to be a security vulnerability. I thought it was discussed and found that the application firewall on OS X functioned as documented (though potentially not as a user would expect). CVE-2007-3036 and CVE-2007-0023 seem to describe similar vulnerabilities, but they're rated less critical on Windows than OS X.
Parent
It's all academic. (Score:5, Insightful)
In the end, what matters is the real-world security performance of these systems. Sure, it's not so easy to quantify and measure, but stories like this ZDNet fodder are just pageview generators, and nothing more.
Re:It's all academic. (Score:5, Insightful)
One thousand exploits that allow someone to wipe a users home directory is nothing compared to single exploit that allows an unauthorized person to gain root access to the machine remotely.
Parent
Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed, although not all the "vulnerabilities" listed in this so-called study do ship from Apple, many are third-party applications that just run on OS X. Also, OS X includes a lot of cool tools with their OS, because they are free. 99.99% of the time, these tools are never used, let alone exposed to the outside world. For example, almost a third of the first 30 CVE's listed in this study apply to the same Perl, regular expression evaluator. Now how many users do you suppose turn on Apache and this module and make use of it on a Web page they're hosting from their home computer? I mean these tools are great for Web developers that want to test stuff on their workstation, but that is likely about all they are used for, in the very rare cases that they are used. That particular module accounts for 8 of the "vulnerabilities" in OS X listed.
It is fine to list these as vulnerabilities, but for a comparison to vulnerabilities in Windows, well they're pretty useless because of the use case as well as the dozens of other things wrong with this study. I mean, the OSS team developing this module lists each and every potential hole they an find on a public Website and it is counted by Secunia. Their list for MS includes only holes that have been discovered by the public and which MS has acknowledged. Since MS does not publish most of the bugs they find, none of those are counted against MS, including the ones they don't bother to fix (more than 50% according to an ex-MS developer I know).
Secunia knows this. Every respectable security expert knows this. The only problem is, random bloggers don't seem to know this, and write "articles" about it which get widespread readership, misinforming large numbers of people and leading them to make incorrect decisions that end up causing problems for everyone.
Parent
It's not size that counts... (Score:5, Funny)
So let me see, we will have:
Re:It's not size that counts... (Score:5, Funny)
So let me see, we will have:
Parent
Re:It's not size that counts... (Score:5, Funny)
- People who don't know how to make bullet points
Parent
Flaming Article (Score:5, Funny)
In other news.. (Score:5, Insightful)
What a joke! (Score:5, Insightful)
So I took a look at a few sample vulnerabilities and it leaves me Flabbergasted. The person who wrote this article and composed the data should be beaten. The ones listed as OS X vulnerabilities are primarily holes in software that runs on OS X, much of which does not even ship with OS X by default. A lot of it is holes in various Web server modules, some of which do ship with OS X, but are disabled by default. Some of them are NOT EVEN VULNERABILITIES... like CVE-2007-3876 which is a number reserved for use by an organization for the next time they report a vulnerability, but they haven't assigned it to anything yet. Whole ranges of numbers listed are like that. I mean did the author even click on the links he's providing? I tried, I was more than twenty items into the list of "highly critical OS X vulnerabilities" before I found one that actually affected a default install of OS X, and it was a potential denial of service for SSL Web sites if you have a machine in the middle. Of the first 30, 12 were reserved for future use and not real vulnerabilities, 7 were holes in the same Perl library, and 5 were holes in tcpdump. Only one was a real, hole that could be exploited on a default install without additional software being added, or it being reconfigured as Web server or something.
Another question is, for the real vulnerabilities to the OS's, how do they decide what the danger level is for a vulnerability? For example, one low rated one for WinXP (CVE-2007-2228) was a possible remote exploit, whereas a Highly cCritical one for OS X (CVE-2007-0267) was a denial of service on a machine, requiring a local user account. Does this make any sense to anyone?
I'm all for pointing out security problems in OS X and other OS's and doing comparisons of relative security, but this is just a sad joke. Please, can we at least get articles by someone with the tiniest bit of a clue instead of the number game from someone who might be able to count, but apparently can't be bothered to read his subject matter.
No point in comparing 'vulnerabilities'... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get it. You opened port 80 on different machines, and saw different traffic, none of which managed to exploit the web server.
I'm sceptical this tells us much about anything, beyond maybe the set up of your NAT/DMZ. Otherwise you should have received exactly the same traffic on both web servers. Bots don't check the OS before sending their exploitable GET requests.
Parent
Re:Yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
This kind of cavalier attitude is what gets people hacked. Clearly you aren't watching your logs very carefully (or you're blocking those ports externally with some kind of firewall), because anyone who runs an SSH server (which is presumably what you're doing on port 22) knows that you get TONS of dictionary attacks. Before I disabled password authentication (and switched to using key-based authentication exclusively), I would sometimes get 20-30MiB of logs, all failed PAM logins with common usernames and from a variety of hosts. Clearly I'm not alone [google.com] either.
From your experience? How do you even know when Apple has a fix? How do you know when the vulnerability has been reported? Are you basing this opinion on fact, or is it your "feel" that Apple is better than Microsoft about this?
Microsoft releases most patches during the Tuesday release cycle.
As someone who works in IT, I can tell you that we don't want patches released "as soon as they are ready". Patches need to be tested, and they need to be tested with other patches. You may not think that Apple patches cause issues, and usually they don't - but even one incompatibility could result in thousands of our users being down for hours or even days. 1000 employees being down costs us $1000000 per day. That's a damn big incentive to get it right.
With the Tuesday cycle, we can test ALL of the critical patches at once, together (about 2 weeks of both automated and manual testing). Then we can roll them ALL out to a pioneer group for a week, and see if any problems arise. If they don't, everyone gets the patch on the 4th week - and the process restarts. Our IT department has people dedicated to doing this cycle.
Guess what? We use the same Tuesday cycle for Mac and Linux patches. So what does Apple's "when it's ready" release process buy us? More time for the script kiddies to reverse-engineer the patch and exploit the vulnerability.
Agreed. Why don't we compare something like Windows Vista? Oh, wait, they did. Vista has fewer reported vulnerabilities than XP now, and far fewer than XP had in its first year of release. Not to mention far, far fewer than Mac OS X.
So, what does this mean? Do these numbers mean that Vista is more secure than Mac OS? No. The number of vulnerabilities is a poor measure for how secure an operating system is.
What it does mean, though, is that all is not well in Wonderland. Security is a process, and that process needs to be well-developed regardless of the software used. Mac OS X is not a silver bullet. Neither is Linux.
Parent