Android ranked 2019’s most vulnerable OS

Google’s Android ended 2019 ranked as the most vulnerable Operating System, highlighting one of the drawbacks of the design of open source ecosystems.  The report by TheBestVPN noted that The National Institute of Standards and Technology discovered 414 vulnerabilities during 2019.

Debian Linux came in at second in the list with 360 discovered vulnerabilities. Microsoft’s Windows rounded out third, fourth and fifth places with 357 (Server 2016 and Windows 10) and 351 for its latest server OS, Windows Server 2019.

Despite this, Google’s popular mobile OS, now in use on over 2.5 billion devices worldwide is becoming more secure with each year. The total discovered vulnerabilities in 2018 were 613, which is a further reduction of 217’s 843.

A spokesperson for Google was keen to point out that “this is actually a result of the openness of the Android ecosystem working as intended” in a statement to Fast Company. The spokesperson continued; “we’re committed to transparency and release public security bulletins monthly on issues that have been fixed in Android to harden the security of the ecosystem. We disagree with the notion that measuring the number of security issues fixed in an OS is any indication of the security of the platform.”

As technology has become increasingly more complex over the last 20 years, the number of vulnerabilities has skyrocketed. In 1999 only 894 technical vulnerabilities were reported, according to NIST. Compared with 2019, the figure is 14-times higher at a whopping 12,174.