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Vista security under scrutiny, again
PC Tools: Windows 2000 more secure

By Tom Espiner

Published: Wednesday 21 May 2008

Security vendor PC Tools has released more research to back up its claim that Vista is far from immune to infection.

In an attempt to reinforce its claim that Vista is less secure than Windows 2000, PC Tools released statistics this week, collected over the six months since last November, from customers using its ThreatFire security software.

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The company found that of 190,692 Vista machines, 121,380 were infected with at least one piece of malware, while some were infected by up to 19 pieces of malicious code. Of the infections, 74 per cent were adware, while 17 per cent were Trojan infections.

Simon Clausen, chief executive of PC Tools, said: "Online threats, such as Trojans, worms and spyware, have the potential to seriously impact consumer privacy and security online. These threats can cause substantial damage, by acting as backdoors for hackers to access personal and confidential information from the PC or for the PC to become integrated into a botnet and be used for malicious purposes."

Clausen denied that such a large proportion of Vista machines being infected is a reflection more on the security of the ThreatFire software than the Vista operating system.

Clausen said: "Firstly, it is important to highlight that all systems used in the research pool were, at the very least, running PC Tool's ThreatFire and that, because the technology is behavioural-based, the data refers to threats that actually executed and triggered our behavioural detection on the client machine."

In response to claims last week by Austin Wilson, director of Windows client security product management, that statistics collected using Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) showed Vista was more secure than Windows 2000, Clausen said: "PC Tools highlights that MSRT is not a comprehensive antivirus scanner, but a malware-removal tool for a limited range of specific, prevalent malicious software."

Microsoft had not responded to a request for comment at the time of writing.