Large technology companies have increasingly embraced open source, discovering the potential it can offer them. Examples include companies such as IBM, which bought Red Hat for $34 billion, and Microsoft, which released a complete Linux in Windows 10.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the best Linux distribution for commercial use, providing manageable and stable products. Red Hat Product Security is a security team that works to identify any problems that arise in Red Hat services and report them as soon as possible.
The recent official “Red Hat Product Security Risk” report, produced by the security team, presented a preview of the issues that Red Hat products faced in 2019. You can see the list of issues here.
2,714 security issues identified in 2019
The report on security is published annually by the company. In 2019, a total of 2,714 flaws . Compared to 2017, where 3,034 flaws were discovered, the number decreased last year.
Regarding Common Vulnerability and Exposures (CVE) and Red Hat Security Advisory (RHSA), both showed a good growth rate from previous years.
CVE is the name assigned to each security issue that the Red Hat team fixes while RHSA is an advisory firm that provides information about security flaws that affect Red Hat.
The numbers show a 3.8% increase in CVEs from 1,272 (2018) to 1,313 (2019). With a total of 968 advisories, the security team published its highest RHSA yet.
Risk level of Red Hat products
Red Hat Linux contains thousands of software packages, each with different bugs and their impact. For this reason, the security team uses a four-point scale to categorize the severity of each bug.
The vulnerabilities discovered are classified as Low, Medium, High or Critical. According to the report, RHEL 6, 7 and 8 products recorded the highest number of critical vulnerabilities. However, the number is lower compared to last year.
But it's also important to note that the security team was able to patch 41% of critical vulnerabilities within a day of discovering the issue. On average, critical issues are patched within a week.
Overall, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is committed to providing a more stable product with rapid risk. Having strong ties and relationships with other communities, it also resolves issues in third-party software.
