Microsoft reports drop in infected PCs

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Latest Security Intelligence report reveals promising stats

Positive news for the security industry emerged today after Microsoft's latest Security Intelligence report revealed a reduction in the volume and severity of vulnerability disclosures and malware infection rates during the first half of the year.

However, Microsoft was forced to patch more vulnerabilities during the first six months of 2010 than during the last six months of 2009.

The Microsoft Security Intelligence Report volume 9 covers the period from January to June 2010 and is based on data gathered from tools such as Windows Defender, Microsoft Security Essentials, Internet Explorer, Forefront, Bing and the Malicious Software Removal Tool.

Vulnerability disclosures were down 7.9 per cent from the second half of 2009, while severity was also largely down in the period, with 'medium' and 'high' disclosures declining by 10.7 per cent and 9.3 per cent.

The number of data breaches involving loss of personally identifiable information, meanwhile, fell 46 per cent in the first half of 2010 compared with the first half of 2009. The loss of such information as a result of malicious activity was half of that due to incidents of negligence, said Microsoft.

There was also positive news on the malware front, with a reported 13.8 per cent drop in the number of infected computers cleaned by Microsoft desktop and anti-malware products during the period.

"There are a host of positive examples of industry efforts having an impact, but we all know that cyber crime is not going away," said Adrienne Hall, general manager of Microsoft Trustworthy Computing.

As if to confirm this, Microsoft cleaned more than 6.5 million computers of botnet infections between April 2010 and June 2010, double the amount for the same period a year before.

Microsoft also revealed that it was forced to patch more vulnerabilities in the first six months of 2010 than during the previous six months.

The average number of vulnerabilities addressed per bulletin increased from 2.2 in the second half of 2009 to 2.8 in the first half of 2010.

Hall said during her keynote speech at RSA Conference Europe that governments and industry must collaborate more to mitigate the cyber security threat.

She also pointed to law enforcement and innovations in the security industry as key elements in the fight against cyber crime.

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