According to a recent study published by Security Innovation, "funded under a research contract from Microsoft", Windows is actually more secure than Linux. Arguments have been going on for years regarding both Windows and Linux security, but this time Microsoft put a stop to it. Security Innovation indecisively concluded, "the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 on Windows Server 2003 solution had fewer security vulnerabilities and fewer days of risk compared to the MySQL and Oracle solutions on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3."
I guess that answers it. How can you refute the cold hard facts? What if you knew that many of the security vulnerabilities found in the study were classified as "Severity: Not Known"? What if Microsoft is choosing not to expose certain known vulnerabilities, while the open source community reports vulnerabilities as soon as discovered so that they may be fixed? What if Security Innovation had tested a different version of Linux? Answers to such questions may be contained deep within the documents, between the lines, or in a back office.
Security Innovation's overview which is available here, and the full security study report can be downloaded here.
