Vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Windows 7 and Windows XP operating systems have rose to 102 and 99 respectively in 2013 from 50 and 49 in 2012.
The share of Microsoftin the total number of vulnerabilities went up from 8.4 percent to 15.9 percent, with an increase by 128.6 percent in the vulnerability count from 2012.
According to the new research by Secunia, Windows 8 reported the highest number of security flaws at 156 in the year 2013. The research firm, however, explained this figure to be the result of integration of Adobe System’s Flash Player into IE browser that accounted for 55 of those vulnerabilities.
The Denmark-based security company released the annual report on software vulnerabilities, with a total of 13,073 vulnerabilities detected in 2,289 products from 539 vendors. This results in a 32 percent increase from 2012 and a 45 percent increase in the five year trend. Around 16.3 percent of the total vulnerabilities were rated as ‘Highly Critical’, while 0.4 percent were ‘Extremely Critical.’ Third-party software vulnerabilities have come down to 75.7 percent in 2013, from 86 percent in 2012.
The first four spots in the list are acquired by the software giant Microsoft, with its XML Core Services, followed by Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer and .Net Framework, along with Visual C++ Redistributable at sixth, Silverlight at eighth, Powershell at ninth. Adobe Flash Player ranks fifth while Adobe Reader comes in the seventh position. Oracle has occupied the tenth spot with its Java platform.
Secunia notes that 78.6 percent of the vulnerabilities were patched on the day of disclosure, compared to 70.1 percent last year. The report shows that there were a total of 727 vulnerabilities in five most popular browsers (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari) marking 18.6 percent decrease from the 893 vulnerabilities in 2012.
