Windows 8 Defeats 85% of Malware Detected In the Past 6 Months

An anonymous reader writes "Now that Windows 8 is on sale and has already been purchased by millions, expect very close scrutiny of Microsoft's latest and greatest security features. 0-day vulnerabilities are already being claimed, but what about the malware that's already out there? When tested against the top threats, Windows 8 is immune to 85 percent of them, and gets infected by 15 percent, according to tests run by BitDefender."

Comments

I'd take this with a grain of salt

[Sycraft-fu]

The reason being it is an AV maker releasing it. They have reason to want to say "Oh the built in AV scanner sucks, you should buy ours!" They may be stacking the results.

AV Comparatives puts MS Security Essentials at about 95% in their latest test, not 85%. Bitdefender is 99.2%.

However one reason for that is false positive rate. MS is willing to trade off some detection to keep it low, because users get pissed off and want to get rid of scanners with lots of false positives. MSE had 0 false positives, BitDefender had 10.

None of this is to say getting a better virus scanner isn't a good idea, just take anything from a company selling a product in an area with a grain of salt. AV Comparatives seems to indicate that wile MSE is certainly not one of the best virus scanners, it isn't bad.

Re:No platform is 100 percent secure?

[Baloroth]

More devices run Linux than Windows. How big of a target do you need?

Ah yes. But which Linux? There is, what, 20+ major distributions and dozens or hundreds of minor ones? Even calling all of them a single OS is almost a stretch, given that some of them have almost nothing in common with each other. That's not one target, it's a few dozen. And it's hacked all the time, just rarely using automated malware tools (because, again, those aren't terribly effective against heavily fragmented targets).