Microsoft, "1 in 300 computers has malware"

http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=21951

Quote:

Microsoft’s data is remarkable because it comes from such a large sample group, the more than 270 million users of the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, which ships with Windows.

Between January 2005 and March 2006, this tool was used to remove 16 million pieces of malware from 5.7 million computers. The software has been used to scan systems 2.7 billion times during this period, and on average, it finds something malicious about 0.32 percent of the time, or in one out of every 311 scans, according to Microsoft

Apparently, Microsoft is saying that their tool finds malware on only 1 of every 300 computers. I find this EXTREMELY hard to believe though. Considering how rampant virus are, how stupid users typically are, the number has got to be bigger than that. Any thoughts as to how Microsoft could come up with results like this?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I thought Windows Defender (new name) only finds and gets rid of spyware and the like. I'm pretty sure it doesn't do anything about viruses. =o

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How did Microsoft arrive at this conclusion? Easy.

1) Faulty definitions of malware.

2) Poor detection rates of acknowledged types of malware in their own tool.

3) Refusal to take into account that users probably scan their box with other anti-malware tools.

All of the above is pure speculation, but it would be easy for them to skew the data even just with the first idea. For example, LavaSoft AdAware artificially inflates the quantity of reported malware by including relatively harmless tracking cookies and MRU lists. It would be only too easy for MS to do something similar in a reverse direction.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by AcerBandit

I thought Windows Defender (new name) only finds and gets rid of spyware and the like. I'm pretty sure it doesn't do anything about viruses. =o

Since you know that Defender actually exists, how have your experiences been with it? I found it to be absolutely terrible after feeling the old Microsoft Anti-Spyware program was one of the best out there. It took a day to scan all of my harddrives and left a bunch of programs that Spybot found about a week later whereas their old program would catch anything Spybot could and then some while doing it in a very short amount of time.

How ya doing, buddy?

I have no idea, RR. I just let it do its thing on the work computers. I've never really seen it in action and since these are new computers and protected very well I've never seen any spyware results. I also have a Zone Alarm Suite that has a virus and spyware checker that does a scan every week. I don't think I've run into spyware in a long time, however that's probably b/c I never manually run the checkers myself so who knows maybe I do get them. *shrug*

Anyone else have any experience with Windows Defender?

I was speaking idiomatically.

All those malware removal just take care of a symptom without touching the causes anyway. Microsoft should be doing their utmost possible to shorten response times for security fixes, finally make some deep architectural changes in NT and effectively promote low access accounts for everyday use. I see them attempt only the latter in Vista but since the beta, UAC is already known for being more of an annoyance than a help.

Edit:
Ah yes, and hopefully the new Windows Firewall will deal properly with outbound traffic this time around.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?