Following the public release of Microsoft Security Essentials a few weeks ago, Microsoft has combed its data and released an interesting set of results showing how different infections apply across the 19 countries in which the software is available. This is how the breakdown of threats fell across those countries:-
According to the data, trojans come up as the number one detection in the USA, worms affect Brazilians the most, and China is mainly affected by potentially unwanted software threats.
Breaking the results down into particular threat families, the Wimad trojans and FakeXPA trojan are the top culprits when it comes to infection in the USA. Brazil is mainly infected by the Conficker worm and the Taterf worm, and China"s software exploits include Shellcode and IFrameRef.
In total, around 4 million threats were detected on the 500,000 machines the survey included. This equates to around 8 detections per machine, suggesting that most machines had multiple threats.
Interestingly, 44% of machines that use Microsoft Security Essentials are running Windows 7, which isn"t due for release until October 22. Of those, about one-third are running in 64-bit mode.
The most detections were found on machines running the ageing Windows XP, and the least on Windows 7, which Microsoft suggest follows the typical trend of seeing fewer threats on newer operating systems.
Microsoft Security Essentials is currently available for download for Windows users at https://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/