FUD - Fear, uncertainty and doubt

Yesterday, a senior security advisor at Sophos, who is responsible for working with the security community and communicating information on security threats to IT professionals, posted an entry on his blog entitled "Windows 7 vulnerable to 8 out of 10 viruses". Given the bad publicity that surrounded the launch of Windows Vista, is this yet another failing on the part of Microsoft that will lead to poor adoption of the Windows 7 platform? Fortunately for Microsoft, if you take the time to read the entry, it turns out that the tests are not even close to stringent enough to make claims that many will interpret to mean Windows 7 is vulnerable to 80% of the infections in the wild.

The first known computer virus was created in the early 1970's, and since then literally millions more have been written, with more being created daily for various nefarious reasons. Sophos, in its test of Windows 7 security in late October, tested a clean install of the operating system against ten of these potential infections. Out of the ten, seven infected the machine successfully, with a further one being able to infect the machine once UAC was manually disabled. The viruses chosen for the test were picked from the top of the SophosLab feed, where researchers from around the globe work to identify known and emerging malware spreading across computer systems all over the world.

Read more: http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/11/04/sophos-windows-7-vulnerable-to-810-viruses-fud-alert