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Malware Scanner Finds 5% of Windows PCs Infected
BogenDorpher writes "According to statistics generated by Microsoft's new free malware scanning and scrubbing tool, Safety Scanner, one in every twenty Windows PCs are infected with malware. Microsoft's Safety Scanner was downloaded 420,000 times in just one week of availability and it cleaned up malware or signs of exploitation from more than 20,000 Windows PCs, according to statistics generated by Microsoft's Malware Protection Center. This resulted in an infection rate of nearly 5%." That seems an awfully low number, based on how quickly Windows machines are scanned for plunder after going online; though it's a few years old, here's a report that suggests (as of 2007, at least) a grace period of less than 10 seconds. That was just one instance, and an intentionally vulnerable machine, but have improvements in security software software, and in Windows itself, made things so much better since then?
Honestly? "as of 2007"? In computer terms, that's several lifetimes.
Not only that, but just because the news article linked to has 2007 at the top, doesn't mean the findings were from 2007. The news article in which the author "just read an incredible scary article" links to said incredible scary article - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/4423733.stm - from 2005. So not only was the news article writer 2 years behind the times, you're now suggesting that we should believe that you find it incredulous that things may have improved in 6 years' time?
In that time Windows 7 and Vista have been released - both with far better security models out of the box. Even Windows XP saw a reasonable update with SP3.
Then again, by April 2005, SP2 was also distributed and guess what it enabled by default? Windows Firewall. The worm in the original article, Sasser, would not have gotten very far.
Then again, Sasser would not even have been on the system if they bothered to install the update that fixed the hole that Sasser would eventually exploit.
It's just not a very convincing example to begin with, and certainly not one you should be citing 6 years later.