Microsoft: AV-Test study that Bing serves 5x more malware is inaccurate
The German IT-Security institute AV-Test published the results of a test study earlier this month that analyzed search engine malware delivery. The company used a sample size of more than 40 million websites delivered as search engine results over the course of an 18 month period. One of the conclusions of the study was that Bing delivered five times as many websites containing malware as Google did while Russian-based Yandex delivered ten times as many as Google Search.
Many websites and news outlet published the data without analysis of their own and word made the round that searching on Bing was less secure than searching on Google.
Microsoft's response to the study paints a different picture. The company noted in a blog post published April 19 that the conclusions drawn from the study are wrong. How this can be? AV-Test used a Bing API to retrieve Bing's search results for any given query that the institute analyzed during the test.Microsoft notes in the blog post that it does not remove malicious sites from its Bing search engine, but rather warns users about them while they are on the site. Results are not suppressed or removed from the index, and since API requests do not include the warnings, the researchers came to the conclusion that Bing delivered more malware than Google.
The conclusion itself is not wrong, as Bing is indeed keeping malicious sites in its index, but searchers are still warned on the results pages when malicious sites have been detected by Microsoft. In addition, links to sites are disabled by default.
The reason why malicious sites are not removed from the index right away according to Microsoft is because the majority of these sites are hacked sites that will eventually return to a clean state. Microsoft warns customers but does not remove results for "completeness and educational reasons".
Completeness refers to the perception of an incomplete search engine. If you search for something and the results get suppressed, you may perceive a search engine as incomplete and maybe even not suitable for you and your searches. Educational on the other hand refers to the warning messages that Bing displays. It informs the searcher that a particular result should not be accessed at that point in time, which not only keeps users secure but also circumvents the problem that users might use a different search engine if results were suppressed (and thus find and click on a result with malicious contents).
David Felstead, Bing's Senior Development Lead, notes that about 1 in 2500 results pages on Bing have a result with a warning on it, and that the warning is displayed in about 1 in a 10000 searches (a user needs to click on a malicious link for the warning to appear).
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Are these articles AI generated?
Now the duplicates are more obvious.
This is below AI generated crap. It is copy of Microsoft Help website article without any relevant supporting text. Anyway you can find this information on many pages.
Yes, but why post the exact same article under a different title twice on the same day (19 march 2023), by two different writers?
1.) Excel Keyboard Shortcuts by Trevor Monteiro.
2.) 70+ Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows by Priyanka Monteiro
Why oh why?
Yeah. Tell me more about “Priyanka Monteiro”. I’m dying to know. Indian-Portuguese bot ?
Probably they will announce that the taskbar will be placed at top, right or left, at your will.
Special event by they is a special crap for us.
If it’s Microsoft, don’t buy it.
Better brands at better prices elsewhere.
All new articles have zero count comments. :S
WTF? So, If I add one photo to 5 albums, will it count 5x on my storage?
It does not make any sense… on google photos, we can add photo to multiple albums, and it does not generate any additional space usage
I have O365 until end of this year, mostly for onedrive and probably will jump into google one
Photo storage must be kept free because customers chose gadgets just for photos and photos only.
What a nonsense. Does it mean that albums are de facto folders with copies of our pictures?
Sounds exactly like the poor coding Microsoft is known for in non-critical areas i.e. non Windows Core/Office Core.
I imagine a manager gave an employee the task to create the album feature with hardly any time so they just copied the folder feature with some cosmetic changes.
And now that they discovered what poor management results in do they go back and do the album feature properly?
Nope, just charge the customer twice.
Sounds like a go-getter that needs to be promoted for increasing sales and managing underlings “efficiently”, said the next layer of middle management.
When will those comments get fixed? Was every editor here replaced by AI and no one even works on this site?
Instead of a software company, Microsoft is now a fraud company.
For me this is proof that Microsoft has a back-door option into all accounts in their cloud.
quote “…… as the MSA key allowed the hacker group access to virtually any cloud account at Microsoft…..”
unquote
so this MSA key which is available to MS officers can give access to all accounts in MS cloud.This is the backdoor that MS has into the cloud accounts. Lucky I never got any relevant files of mine in their (MS) cloud.
>”Now You: what is your theory?”
That someone handed an employee a briefcase full of cash and the employee allowed them access to all their accounts and systems.
Anything that requires 5-10 different coincidences to happen is highly unlikely. Occam’s razor.
Good reason to never login to your precious machine with a Microsoft a/c a.k.a. as the cloud.
The GAFAM are always very careless about our software automatically sending to them telemetry and crash dumps in our backs. It’s a reminder not to send them anything when it’s possible to opt out, and not to opt in, considering what they may contain. And there is irony in this carelessness biting them back, even if in that case they show that they are much more cautious when it’s their own data that is at stake.