Symantec Security Response has spent months throwing every hack but the kitchen sink at Microsoft"s Vista operating system, and on Feb. 28 it released a series of papers that showed just how bloodied or victorious Vista remained. The result: "There are existing codes that can survive Vista without being modified— [certain] keyloggers, worms, Trojans, and spyware are able to survive," said Symantec Research Scientist Ollie Whitehouse in an interview with eWEEK.
The current threat level of the Vista security-resistant malware is "relatively low," Whitehouse said, but he said that out of box, Vista already has several legacy threats. "It won"t take much for [those] to evolve," he said. This is in spite of Microsoft"s years of work and investments in new security technologies, which Symantec predicted will result in "fewer instances of widespread worms that target core Windows operating system vulnerabilities," researchers wrote in one report, "Microsoft Windows Vista and Security."