Microsoft released a pdf file called MSRT – Progress Made Lessons Learned yesterday which provides an analysis of the data that the program reported when scanning computers. The tool itself was executed more than 2.7 billion times on at least 270 million unique computers since January 13th, 2005. The tool has removed more than 16 million instances of malicious software which means that on average every 311th computer was infected.
Backdoors and Trojans were found on 3,5 million unique computers which means that a backdoor trojan was active in 62% of the infected computers. Rootkits have been found in 14% of all infected computers with 6% identified as the Sony BMG Rootkit. About 80% of the computers were newly infected ones while 20% were computers that had been infected before.
I think Microsoft presents some interesting stats in the document. The tool itself scans for only a fraction of circulating malware and was still able to clean a large number of scanned computers. It´s alarming that 20% of the computers were infected more than once which seems to suggest that their owners did not learn from past errors.
Microsoft should think about an educational program released with the software removal tool educating the users of infected pcs what went wrong and how they could secure their computers to prevent an infection in the future.
Update: Windows users can download Microsoft Security Essentials for free for their computer system. The program protects the computer against many know threats, but not against unknown threats as it comes without heuristics to detect those. It will however work nicely with other security software installed on the system.
The Malicious Software Removal Tool is also still available. It can be downloaded from this official web address. Please note that it can only remove known and popular threats from your computer.
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The Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool is definatly detecting and cleaning not enough trojans and virii.