Switchfast Blog: The Future of IT
Windows 7 is More Secure, but You Still Need Antivirus
Thursday, November 05, 2009 by Michael Holley
Though there seems to be a recent trend of companies touting
their OS's as "super secure," benchmarking tests have again shown
that the need for antivirus software still exists. Like Apple's Snow
Leopard and its proprietary antivirus software, Windows 7 has
definitely become more secure, but not to the point that you can
realistically omit a third-party antivirus package.
SophosLabs loaded a clean PC up with Windows 7 and no antivirus
software. They configured UAC settings to default and then tested
the system by loading the ten latest malware threats from their own
feed. The results: Windows blocked just two of the viruses from
running.
Now, this doesn't mean that Windows 7 is an unstable platform,
it just means that, as we expected, you still need to supplement it
with virus protection. Also, to be fair, this test was run under
default UAC configurations, something Microsoft has scaled back
thanks to widespread complaints from Vista users. It's very
possible that it would have blocked more if the UAC configuration
was set to a more secure level.
You can read the original article, with a more detailed
description of the testing, here.
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