Home > News

Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report Shows Largest Uptick

By Laura Tucker
Windows Vulnerabilities Featured

Is it any wonder Microsoft is rumored to be launching Windows 11, with the Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report showing the largest uptick since the inception of the report? Who could blame Microsoft for wanting to dump Windows 10 and start all over with Windows 11?

Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report

News of vulnerabilities never seems to make users feel at ease. And while we’ve heard much about the Windows vulnerabilities, we tend to think all operating systems have vulnerabilities – and they do! But some have more – many more – than others.

The 2021 Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report shows stats of the previous year. Along with assessing vulnerabilities, it also assesses companies’ severity rating and takes a look at how many could be
mitigated. The Windows vulnerabilities result in major security breaches – in fact, one in three are caused by unpatched vulnerabilities.

Windows Vulnerabilities Microsoft

There were 1,268 Microsoft vulnerabilities reported in 2020. That’s an astounding 48 percent rise over the reports in 2019. Of those 2020 reported vulnerabilities, 196 were rated as critical. And of those, 109 could have been mitigated by the removal of administrator rights.

In 2020 alone, 90 percent of critical vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer would have been mitigated through the removal of admin rights, 85 percent would have been through Edge, and 100 percent through Outlook.

Comparing OS Vulnerabilities

Again, all OSes have vulnerabilities, but to better gauge the severity of Microsoft’s vulnerabilities, let’s compare it to other operating systems.

Since 2018, Windows 10 is third on the list of critical vulnerabilities, but it’s higher on the list than any Apple or Google product. The only two OSes that had more vulnerabilities were Debian (2800) and Ubuntu (1939), with Windows 10 having 1765.

Windows Vulnerabilities Security

Right below Windows 10 is Windows Server 2016 with 1731. This is followed closely by Android with 1712. Windows Server 2019, Fedora, Windows Server 2012, and Windows 8.1 follow.

Google Chrome is next down the list, in tenth place with 1067 critical vulnerabilities, followed by Linux Kernel and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server. Apple finally cracks the list in thirteenth place with 820 vulnerabilities. macOS is in sixteenth place with only 759.

Looking just at 2020’s numbers for total vulnerabilities, Google landed behind Microsoft in second place with 950 to Microsoft’s 1,188. Apple was in eighth place with 381.

Windows Vulnerabilities Laptop

The current 2021 stats follow similar placement with companies. Microsoft is again at number one with 510 vulnerabilities so far, Google in a close second with 507, and Apple in ninth place with 147. Looking at individual products, Windows 10 is again in third place – behind Fedora and Debian.

With the poor performance of Windows 10 on the Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report, is it any wonder they are rumored to be introducing Windows 11 soon? These vulnerabilities don’t reflect well on Microsoft and only lead to security breaches. Windows 11 could be a way to start over.

Read on to learn about Microsoft blaming Chinese hackers for exploiting four zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.