The 'killer' app for Microsoft's platforms? Malware

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 19 May 2011 13:45

Your IT - Home IT

Microsoft's malfeasance over security issues over the years has truly come home to roost, with the company claiming that '1 out of every 14 programs download is later confirmed as malware'.

Thank you, Microsoft, for building such an insecure operating system and computing platform.

Your reward, as you've discovered and shared in your blog about your IE9 Smartscreen application, is an ecosystem that produces so much malware, that you've discovered that 1 in 14 programs your users download ends up being malware.

It raises the question: why use Windows? Hello Mac OS X, hello Linux, hello iOS, hello Android, hello QNX and even hello WebOS - your time is now, more than ever before, and if you lot, as competitors, can't capitalise on this latest scandal to increase your users, Windows may well stay the window into a world of malware-ridden computing forever.

That's not to say that malware of different types doesn't exist for those competing systems, or that they offer uncompromisable security - they don't.

But as we all know, the crooks follow the money and do their best to steal it, and if you're a Windows user, you're under constant attack, now so constant, that 1 in 14 programs you download is very likely malware - probably even if you know absolutely what it is you're doing.

Ok, ok, so I'm hammering the big MS a lot here, with Microsoft saying that 'social-engineering attacks, like tricking a user into running a malicious program, are far more common than attacks on security vulnerabilities', with social-engineering able to be used to fool anyone, no matter what system they use.

But 1 in 14 attacks is still a very damning figure. At least Microsoft is working hard to develop defences, and is spruiking IE9's 'Application Reputation' feature to 'protect users from these socially engineered malware attacks', with its blog post offering details 'about real-world attacks and how these protections work'.

 

Continued on page two, please read on!