Is Apple the most insecure software company in the world?

That’s the startling claim from security company Secunia, which claims that in the first half of 2010, more flaws were reported for Apple products than for any other computer software vendor.

In this race to the bottom, Oracle was No. 2 and Microsoft was No. 3. Apple had held the No. 2 slot since 2007, finally overtaking Oracle this year for the first time.

The report considers not just operating systems but all programs that run on that vendor’s platform — so in the case of Apple, not just MacOS is studied but also QuickTime and iTunes, as well as third-party applications like Flash and Java that run on that OS. In fact, it is third-party applications that are responsible for the lion’s share of insecurity problems across the board, not just with Apple. Third-party applications are expected, for example, to be responsible for upwards of 80 percent of the problems on Microsoft-based operating systems.

Web browsers, as a general software category, are by far the most insecure products around.

Also of note: The report does not consider the severity of the flaws it finds. A trivial security flaw is weighted in the report just as heavily as a critical one. Nearly 80 percent of vulnerabilities tracked by Secunia are considered “moderate,” “low” or “not critical.”

So the information is imperfect, to be sure, but it is at least instructive. Secunia’s CEO calls the trend in application insecurity “alarming,” noting that in the first six months of 2010, we’ve already hit 89% of the total number of vulnerabilities reported in all of 2009. The number of vulnerabilities being discovered has been essentially doubling every two years — and that rate is accelerating.