Microsoft–like most tech companies–is known to toot its own horn from time to time. So it comes as no surprise to see yet another security study out of Redmond looking to debunk the idea that Windows Vista is insecure. Insecure? Far from it–Vista is the most secure major OS on the market, if you ask Microsoft. And how, you might ask, did they arrive at this conclusion? Well, it looks like they put together a handy little graph that compares the number of vulnerabilities found during the first year of release to the number of vulnerabilities fixed during that year, for four different operating systems: Windows XP, Vista, OS X 10.4, Ubuntu 6.06 and Red Hat RHEL4. According to the data, Vista had the fewest number of vulnerabilities and the highest ratio of vulnerabilities to fixes. In another chart, data is collected on the number of security updates, patches and weeks with at least one patch. And once again, Vista sweeps all three categories with the lowest score.

So what do you say, folks, is Vista the most secure OS around? If you ask me, despite all the charts and graphs, this is all still pretty subjective. After all, the vulnerabilities and fixes are boiled down to raw numbers without any comment on the nature of the vulnerabilities, whether or not an exploit was actually produced and circulated, the amount of time elapsed between the discovery of a vulnerability and the patch, etc. What do you think, readers, does Vista deserve all the kudos? Let us know in the comments.

For the full scoop:
– see Microsoft security strategy director Jeff Jones’ blog entry