PC Tools Software: Vista not that good at security

PC Tools Software: Vista not that good at security

Security vendor PC Tools Software has said in a report that Windows Vista is in fact more vulnerable to malware compared to previous operating systems like Windows 2000.

The company said that Vista is more secure compared to Windows XP but it is still not good enough.

Simon Clausen, CEO of PC Tools said in a statement: “Ironically, the new operating system has been hailed by Microsoft as the most secure version of Windows to date. However, recent research conducted with statistics from over 1.4 million computers within the ThreatFire community has shown that Windows Vista is more susceptible to malware than the eight year old Windows 2000 operating system, and only 37% more secure than Windows XP.”

Their research found out that Vista let in as many as 639 threats per thousand computers. Other operating systems? Here is the data:

Windows 2000: 586
Windows 2003: 478
Windows XP: 1021

Microsoft responded to this claim in its statement: “We appreciate independent studies and encourage researchers to help us make our products more secure; however, this is a study by a vendor of anti-malware products. ThreatFire vulnerability comparison numbers certainly don’t reflect our vulnerability findings from the malicious software removal tool, which ran on over 400 million machines in December 2007. From June 2007 through December 2007, the MSRT found malware on 2.8% of the Windows Vista machines it ran on, vs. 7.2% of Windows XP SP2 machines. It found malware on 5% of Windows 2000 SP4 machines and 12.2% of Windows 2000 SP3 machines. Note that for Windows 2000 this spans both client and server machines.”