A recent report published by the security experts at Secunia finds that Apple, Oracle and Microsoft are 1, 2 and 3, respectively, in known software vulnerabilities across all their non-OS products. If you don’t want to read the full article, The Windows Club has a good write-up about it where they make a good point:

The report shows an alarming development in 3rd party program vulnerabilities, representing an increasing threat to both users and business, which, however, continues to be greatly ignored.

This trend is supported by the fact that users and businesses still perceive the operating system and Microsoft products to be the primary attack vector, largely ignoring 3rd party programs, and finding the actions to secure these too complex and time-consuming.

Granted, the more software titles you support on Windows, the more likely you are to higher up on the list because the rankings are determined by the total of all vulnerabilities in all your products. Interestingly enough, however the ranking of browsers from most to least security issues goes: Firefox, Safari, Chrome and finally IE8 (meaning IE8 has the fewest known vulnerabilities).

These findings are determined based on Secunia’s Personal Software Inspector (PSI) application and are simply aggregate totals that do not take the severity of the known issues into consideration.

Again, these rankings do not include the OS, only 3rd party applications running on Windows. So the moral of this story is to make sure you keep all your software titles up to date as much as possible.

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