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In Test, Windows 7 Vulnerable To 8 Out of 10 Viruses
As Windows 7's market share passes 3.6%, up from 1.9% the day before launch,
llManDrakell notes an experiment they did over at Sophos. They installed Windows 7 on a clean machine — with no anti-virus protection — with User Access Control in its default configuration. They threw at it the next 10 virus/worm samples that came in the door. Seven of them ran; UAC stopped only one baddie that had run in the absense of UAC. "Lesson learned? You still need to run anti-virus on Windows 7."
""Lesson learned? Don't run Windows 7."
Oh, wait, that would challenge the iron law of commercial software reviews, of not considering alternatives.
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You won't hear a lot about virus problems with Windows 7 at Lifehacker. Just about everybody over there who says bad things about Vista In Lipstick...sorry, I mean Vista SP2...damn, happened again...WIN7, gets their commenting privileges yanked.
I imagine one of their little contests in the next week or two will be encouraging their pet Win7 lovers to vote on the best on-line anti-virus scanner.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
It's a kdawson summary. What did you expect? Accuracy?
No sig, sorry.
That's not really true. Yeah, a lot of Windows problems come from idiots downloading and running stupid things, but there have been many exploits that don't (merely visiting a website, in some cases) or that are a result of operating under the Windows mindset.
By that, I mean that Windows is constantly, unendingly, eternally in your face with endless alerts and notifications and other idiotic garbage. Everything is always updating and connecting and scanning and detecting and it has to tell you all of this RIGHT NOW. Tons of those alerts don't go away unless you click on them.
The software developers for Windows make it even worse. They load everything into the systray and every program has to have its own little updater and alerter and everything is constantly reminding you about updates and restart this program and new virus definitions and watch out for snakes and blah blah blah.
Working in an environment like this, users are very quickly trained to just click away these messages. Then some dope gets the bright idea to make a popup that looks more or less like all the other inane notifications Windows spews, and surprise, the users click it -- unwittingly downloading and installing some sort of crapware.
You don't see that kind of thing in Linux under any DE or WM I've ever used. Just from that one simple difference, the probability of users mindlessly clicking things to dismiss them is drastically reduced.
Furthermore, in Windows, the expected means of getting new software is to search the web, download something from god-knows-where, and run an executable installer. That's completely normal in Windows, and users are thus trained to think that downloading and running stuff is okay. In Linux, you get some sort of package manager, where the software is vetted and verified, and downloading and running random executables from the web is very unusual. As such, Linux users are far less prone to the kind of crap Windows faces.
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