Personal computers in India are the worst affected by malicious worms, which wipe out important data from the machine, says Microsoft.

The Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool detected malware on 13.8 of every 1,000 computers scanned in India in the fourth quarter of last year. This is very high when compared to the global average of 7.1, said Mr Tim Rains, Director, Trustworthy Computing, Microsoft. In Japan, it was less than two per 1,000, he said.

On the rise

The threat landscape in India has turned out to be more active than initially suspected. India has had a relatively low malware infection rate for some time, which seemed subdued for a region that has such a large high-tech industry. But with the new data released in the latest Microsoft Security Intelligence Report, the plot thickens, Mr Rains told Business Line on the sidelines of this year’s Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Media Campus Tour at the company’s headquarters in Redmond. Microsoft sponsored this correspondent’s trip to attend the three-day event.

Data in the report are generated by Microsoft security programmes and services running on computers in India. This data is provided by computers whose administrators have opted in to providing telemetry data, using IP address geo-location to determine country or origin.

Worm menace

The most important malware category was worms. It affected 39.8 per cent of all computers cleaned. The second most common category was ‘miscellaneous trojan,’ and the third was ‘miscellaneous potentially unwanted software,’ he said.

Microsoft, which has done such a study in different countries, said that most common threat family in India was Win31/Autorun, which is a family of worms that spread by copying itself to the mapped drives of an infected computer. The mapped drives may include network or removable drives like the USB, he said.

In India, the biggest problem is people buying pirated software, which can attract worms and viruses easily. Also, people often download material from unknown source in the Web. This could bring in worms and viruses. Indians should protect their computers by regularly updating their anti-virus software to block the malware, he said.

> raja@thehindu.co.in

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