Microsoft has been publishing their Security Intelligence Report for a few years now - we are now on Issue 17. Last week, the latest update has been released and is available from the Microsoft download center here.
This latest report covers a great detail of the territory that marks out the major security issues of our time;
- including security credentials
- application, operating and browser security
- and the dangers of expired anti-virus and anti-malware software
One of the real surprises in this lengthy security briefing is the risk of running expired anti-malware software is sometimes actually worse than not running with any protection at all.
The following diagram details each of the risk profiles for anti-malware software.
As you can see from the diagram, The "red" bar representing expired software was almost as high as the "pink" bar with no protection.
Referencing the latest version of the Microsoft SIR document, the authors note;
"Computer users who experience malware infections because of expired security
software are likely to conclude that the protection offered by such products is
largely illusory. An examination of infected and clean computers with security
software from one such vendor, Vendor A, shows that expired security software
misses far more infection attempts than it catches".
Microsoft offers free anti-virus and anti-malware protection, that may not suit all of your needs, but according to the data collected here, it is much better to enable these tools on your desktops than continue to use other expired software. You can get the latest definitions here.
And, if you are using Microsoft Windows 8.1 you are automatically covered if you have enabled automatic updates.
No comments:
Post a Comment