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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."
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.
More like Linux still doesn't have the market share to warrent spending significant time developing malware for it.
Bitdefender sells security products. Can we get a number from somebody a little less biased, or perhaps somebody biased against microsoft? How about a consulting firm with a good reputation the prefers Linux, but grudgingly supports MS because they have to? Anyway, Bitdefender has an incentive for you to think Win8 is insecure. How are they defining malware? Stuff that says, "to install, please enter admin password"? If 15% of the "malware" comes with those instructions, it'll infect anything.
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).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
That's OK, it's 15% backwards compatible.
Blank until
In the last couple versions of Windows, MS has been trying to implement something like the old (pre SELinux) *nix security model. This after having removed it. Why? Because they had removed the security, for good reason, and the *nix model is a good one. In the old days, there were network operating systems. Many users had terminals to one computer, which protected one user's work from other users mistakes or malice. It was designed for security and it was Unix. It was also huge and EXPENSIVE. One day a guy wanted an OS to fit on a 512k floppy disk and run with 128k RAM so people could afford computers at home. Single home computers, not corporate networks. To make Disk Operating System fit on a floppy, he removed stuff DOS didn't need, like security. (No network meant few threats.) A GUI was added. Backwards compatibilty was maintained with the "no security needed" DOS. Then the internet happened, and Bill crapped his pants. Since then, MS has been trying to design security back in, while maintaining backward compatibility. DOS programs still run on Vista, without running into problems with new security added since Disk Operating System. Linux has always been a network OS, never a disk OS, and has therefore never removed the security model.