Well, not as bad as all that at least. However, the war of words continues between Symantec and Microsoft that will no doubt one day rival the Coke Pepsi wars. Symantec has taken the next swing by calling out Vista as potentially being less stable than Windows XP.
Microsoft has re-written its networking stack for Windows Vista in order to allow for “easier maintenance, improved performance, and improved stability”. But an analysis by security researchers at Symantec found a variety of security flaws with early builds of the OS.
In a white paper based on this research, Windows Vista Network Attack Surface Analysis: A Broad Overview (PDF), the researchers conclude that Vista may be less stable, at least for the immediate future, than Windows XP. They reached this conclusion after looking at the stability of Vista, searching for undocumented or unexpected behavior and probing for the effect of adding support for new protocols, such as native support for IPv6. Researchers also looked for the susceptibility of Windows Vista to well known attacks, fixed in previous versions of Windows.
It should be noted that the aforementioned tests are germain to the Beta code release. They have posted more information on this on their blog as well.
[tags]Symantec, Microsoft, Windows Vista, Vista Security, Beta, Less Stable[/tags]