Viruses/Worms News

Microsoft Security Essentials anti-virus detects 4 million bugs

Monday, October 19, 2009

Microsoft Security Essentials, the free anti-virus tool, was downloaded on 1.5 million PCs in the first week of its release and detected almost 4 million threats including worms, Trojans and other malware.

Microsoft said last week that through October 6, the anti-virus scanned 535,752 infected PCs in multiple countries finding 4 million malware threats. The detections are eight times the number of machines infected because many computers are infected with multiple threats.

The most infected country was the United States, with 27 percent of the infected machines. The most common U.S. infections were Trojans, which can steal data and connect user PCs to botnets controlled by cyber hackers.

According to the Microsoft Malware Protection Center's threat research and response blog, the most common U.S. Trojans included Wimad and FakeXPA, a family of Fake AV programs that claim to scan for malware and display fake warnings of malicious programs.

The operating system with the most threat detections per user was Windows XP, while the Windows 7 OS had the fewest per user. Windows 7 machines made up 44 percent of those with Microsoft Security Essentials activated.