‘STOP USING WINDOWS 7’

Should you believe Microsoft’s new malware warning?

Security experts have cast doubt on the relevance of Microsoft’s claim that Windows 7 users are at greater risk of ransomware than people running Windows 10.

In a report published in November (www.snipca.com/22669), Microsoft said that people running Windows 10 are 58 per cent less likely to be targeted by ransomware than those on Windows 7. It urges Windows 7 users to upgrade to 10 to avoid the “increasing” threat. It says that Windows Defender, Microsoft’s antivirus tool, identified a 400 per cent rise in ransomware between December 2015 and July 2016.

In July alone, Defender detected 58 million attempts to infect PCS with ransomware via email, while the Smartscreen Filter in Internet Explorer and Edge blocked 200,000 attacks a day over the past six months.

However, security experts doubt the validity of Microsoft’s research, claiming that it exaggerates the threat.

Simon Edwards, who used to run Computeractive’s antivirus tests and is now director of security consultancy SE Labs, said: “The problem with Microsoft’s claim is that it’s based on the overall numbers of computers exposed to ransomware, not the proportion of machines running each operating system”. He added: “Windows 7 is used on millions more PCS than Windows 10, so it’s not surprising that ransomware has been detected on it more often”.

Edwards accepts that Windows 10 has better built-in security than 7, but “not to the extent suggested by Microsoft’s statistics”. Despite his criticism of the report, Edwards says that Microsoft is right “to highlight the growing threat of ransomware in general”.

Microsoft v Malware

In its report Microsoft refers to several improvements it has made to Windows 10 to combat malware. The company says it has made Edge better at preventing malware from exploiting security flaws in software in order to infect

computers. It also minimises the risk of using Adobe Flash Player by running the browser plug-in in its own “application container”.

Other improvements cited demonstrate the importance of artificial intelligence (or ‘machine learning’) in fighting malware. Microsoft has used the technology to enhance how its email services block malware, and how its Smartscreen Filter identifies unsafe websites.

To stay safe next year read the Cover Feature of our next issue – Make Your PC Unhackable in 2017 – out on Weds 21 December.