Microsoft has recently released its latest Security Intelligence Report (SIR) which details, among other things, rates of malware infections across the various Windows operating systems. The report is entirely security related and not meant specifically as a vessel to encourage XP users to upgrade. However, that certainly is a side effect, unintentional or not – many of the report’s findings do suggest that an immediate upgrade might be a prudent move for XP users.
On the surface at least, these statistics tend to confirm that users who went looking for possible malware via MSRT were 5.7 times more likely to find infections on XP than on Windows 8. On the other hand, MSRT has never been a broad spectrum anti-malware tool, mainly dealing with only the most commonly encountered malware families. As such, it could be argued that MSRT has perhaps developed a bias toward XP related malware in general, and the infection rate statistics shown may merely represent the level of MSRT’s effectiveness per Windows version.