Mac OS X Reported Safest Computing Environment

As originally reported this morning by Slashdot.org:

"The British security firm mi2g has concluded a comprehensive 12-month study to identify the safest 24/7 computing environment.

In the end, the open source BSD and Mac OS X came out on top with the fewest security breaches against permanently connected machines worldwide in homes, small businesses, large enterprises and governments.

The study found Linux to be the most breached environment 'in terms of manual hacker attacks overall and accounts for 65.64% of all breaches recorded'.

Windows was the most breached environment in government computing and led Linux, BSD and Mac OS X by far in economic damage caused by breaches."

Previous study.

Here a few excerpts from the mi2g original press release:

"In 2004, 32.7% of all digital breaches were carried out against micro entities including home-based individuals with 24/7 online computers; 58.8% of all digital breaches were against small entities; 6.1% of all digital breaches were against medium size entities; and only 2.5% of all digital breaches were against large entities - businesses, government agencies and non-government organisations inclusive.

...successful hacker attacks against Mac OS X or BSD based online computers has demonstrated a declining trend and accounts for just 4.82% of all breaches recorded, with 11,370 successfully compromised BSD targets of all flavours including Apple.

Global economic damage estimate

In 2004, the overall economic damage from hacker perpetrated overt, covert and DDoS digital attacks worldwide is estimated to have been between $103bn and $126bn by the mi2g Intelligence Unit. These figures exclude malware attacks through viruses, worms and trojans which account for an additional estimated damage of between $166bn and $202bn worldwide.

Economic damage is calculated by the mi2g Intelligence Unit on the basis of helpdesk support costs, overtime payments, contingency outsourcing, loss of business, bandwidth clogging, productivity erosion, management time reallocation, cost of recovery and software upgrades. When available, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) violations as well as customer and supplier liability costs have also been included in the estimates.

Conclusion

"More and more smart individuals, government agencies and corporations are shifting towards Apple and BSD environments in 2004," according to DK Matai, Executive Chairman, mi2g. "For how long can the truth remain hidden that the great emperors of the software industry are wearing no clothes fit for the fluid environment in which computing takes place, where new threats manifest every hour of every day.

There is an accelerating paradigm shift visible in 2004 and busy professionals have spotted the benefits of Apple and BSD because they don't have the time to cope with umpteen flavours of Linux or to wait for Microsoft's Longhorn when Windows XP has proved to be a stumbling block in some well chronicled instances."

mi2g Full Press Release.

mi2g Research Methodology: The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Full details of the October 2004 report are available as of 1st November 2004 and can be ordered from here. Content sample.