Apple's OS X had most vulnerabilities in October

Apple's OS X, followed by Adobe's Reader and Acrobat, were the products with the largest number of new vulnerabilities as of October, according to a report from Flexera Software.

The quarterly report into the top 20 products with the most vulnerabilities also showed that Microsoft had the largest number of vulnerable products among the top 20 lists for the three months.

As of October there were 137 vulnerabilities in OS X, and 56 each for Adobe Reader and Acrobat. Apple's iOS also appeared in the top 20, in eighth place with 42 vulnerabilities.

Microsoft products meanwhile accounted for 12 entries among the 60 in the three top 20 lists for August, September and October, with Microsoft overtaking IBM as the company with the most products represented.

Flexera said this is due to both Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge coming bundled with Adobe Flash, adding the 35 Flash vulnerabilities to Windows operating systems from 8 and later.

“This means that for Windows systems from 8 and later, the 35 vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player are added to the Microsoft vulnerabilities, resulting in these products climbing higher than they otherwise would," Flexera Software Director of Secunia Research Kasper Lindgaard said.

The inclusion of Flash meant that even though Windows 7 is now past its end of mainstream support date, the operating system had only 21 vulnerabilities as of August, compared to 56 for Windows 8.

Notably, the top 20 lists include multiple security-related products, including a unified security management suite from AlienVault and firewall, policy enforcement and application security managers from F5.

There were 2450 total vulnerabilities among the products represented in the three top 20 lists, the report shows.

Image courtesy of Yuri Samoilov under CC