The bad news? Incidents of malware continues to increase. The good news? Free software scanning tools are helping to detect and clean users’ systems automatically.
That’s the upshot of the latest Security Intelligence Report from Microsoft, which described a significant increase in the number of infected PCs over the course of 2009.
eSecurity Planet takes a look at the latest security data from Microsoft, and the mitigating impact its new Security Essentials tools are having on the problem.
The numbers of PCs cleaned by Microsoft’s anti-malware software worldwide during the second half of 2009 continued to trend upward, suggesting that more PCs are getting infected in total, according to the company’s latest Security Intelligence Report (SIR).
The good news, though, is that Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) also said that its launch of its new Security Essentials free anti-malware tools last September is helping it keep pace, helping it catch and clean infected PCs.
Released this week, Microsoft’s Security Intelligence Report Volume 8 (SIRv8) said that the company’s software scanned some 500 million PCs worldwide in the second half of 2009. Of those, Microsoft caught and cleaned 1.7 million more infected PCs in the second half than it did in the first half of last year.
