The IT Nerd

As if Microsoft doesn’t have enough issues with its dead on arrival new Vista OS, a new report by Australian anti-virus firm ThreatFire says that Vista can be hit by Malware:

“In total, Vista suffered 121,380 instances of malware from its 190,000 user base, a rate of malware detection per system is proportionally lower than that of XP, which saw 1,319,144 malware infections from a user base of 1,297,828 machines, but it indicates a problem that is worse than Microsoft has been admitting to.”

Now this is usually the part where I bash Microsoft and tell you to run LINUX or buy a Mac. But I’m not going to do that this time. Why? Simple:

• Malware is not defined anywhere in the article. I know from experience that some “malware” scanners tend to mark even cookies as malware. So one has to wonder if this is what the article is referring to.
• How many of these “infected” computers had UAC and automated updates turned off? That would make it rather easy for “malware” to sneak onto a Vista machine.

These two items alone make me want to file this under FUD. I’m not a fan of Vista, but it seems that this report is simply a means to sell anti-virus software. This report also creates the impression that Vista is insecure. It might be or it might not be. This report doesn’t exactly do anything to confirm or deny that in any meaningful way. I’d love to see somebody outside of the anti-virus industry do a study like this so that we can answer this question once and for all. At least such a study would be impartial.

This entry was posted on May 20, 2008 at 8:50 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Microsoft, virus, Vista, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.