Since I've never encountered Mi2g in any capacity, it's not easy to assess the company's standing as a security consultant.

Of course, every security company in the world is a market leader of some kind - the security market seems like a 1,000-way dead heat for first - but Mi2g is at least punching above its weight in terms of media strategy.

It's got a press release or a statement or a piece of proprietary research to cover just about any eventuality.

Still, given the long campaign by Linux advocates to promote open source software as intrinsically more secure than proprietary software, and the long campaign by Microsoft to recover its security credibility, a story which says "Linux is insecure" is a dead-cert to get at least a few headlines.

Unfortunately, if I tried to do anything more than rehash the same sketchy details as have already found their way around the IT press, I would be up against it.

The Facts

The facts that Mi2g has gone to press with are sketchy, to say the least. It says that more than 17,000 servers on the Internet were attacked during January; that the most-attacked server operating system was Linux; and the Mac and BSD are the most secure server operating systems based on the number of successful breaches.

For those who like numbers, Mi2g is saying that January saw just over 17,000 successful attacks; and that more than 13,600 of those involved Linux servers versus just over 2,000 for Windows servers.

Well, that's pretty conclusive, isn't it?

No.

Methodology

It's very hard to discuss the raw data, or to analyse the methodology, because I can't read the source report.

Why not? Because Mi2g requests payment for press releases. In the case of the January report, it's asking nearly $100.

A sufficiently cynical character - me, for example - might be led to wonder. Perhaps the media which rate "most favoured status" get to see a sliver of real data - maybe the executive summary of the report, for example, or maybe they get the media release for nothing. But Mi2g is not exposing itself to the wholesale scrutiny of the press.

And I would be surprised if any of the favoured media read the incredibly onerous license terms Mi2g applies to everything it commits to a document. If you've received an Mi2g media release, it is (as far as I can tell from the legalese on the Website) released under conditions such as the data remaining the property of Mi2g rather than the media.

Read this full article at commsworld.com

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