Microsoft Finds 6.5 Million Infected Machines

Microsoft released volume 9 of its Security Intelligence Report yesterday, which revealed some rather startling statistics on malware-infected machines running Windows. The company reported a 100 percent increase in the number of Bot-infected systems worldwide. This translated into a total of 6.5 million infected machines. A Microsoft malware removal tool that is automatically installed with an update cleaned up the infected machines.

The problem, of course, is that the removal tool has a very limited set of malware samples it's tracking. The removal tool is in no way replacing antivirus programs. It's just going after the top bots out there. In fact, it's a bit surprising that some of the household name bots, like Zeus, are nothing compared to some of the spam kits that are being found by the removal kit.

You can find a more detailed explanation on the report here. Also, if you want to compare the last two reports, here is volume 8.