Davey Winder says that 80 percent of viruses love Windows 7, and that a Windows 7 machine without AV software on it gobbled up viruses like a fat kid gobbles up candy on Halloween. Now this was a bit of an unfair test, not installing AV software, but still, the "we're making Windows more secure" mantra has been going at MS for a while now, you'd think that this would be better.
As a note, here is the article that RoundTop mentioned.
Which is why Microsoft released FOR FREE Security Essentials, a fully fledged AV product for Windows.
Why isn't it baked in by default? Antitrust. 3rd party AV vendors would scream foul if Security Essentials was built into the platform, much like Netscape/Firefox whined about the browser years ago.
You are right it is an unfair test. Until antitrust laws stop stiffling innovation under the guise of protecting business competitiveness, we have to deal with ridiculious nature to which software vendors have to go to play nice with others. Even when it sacrifices security in the process.
True, but shouldn't the os and all the new UAC protection stuff protect against more than 80% of the viruses out there without needing AV? I don't know the details of of what sort of viruses they threw at the system, or what they did, and obviously no matter what OS you run if you click on a file that does an rm -rf * there's not much you can do about it. But if the viruses did priv. escalation and such, shouldn't the OS deal with those things? Again, w/o details of what the viruses did it's hard to say. Still a bit disappointing that the OS still needs an AV installed pretty much ASAP to be safe though.
Slashdot had a good acticle about this.
The tests were of trojans that DID NOT require escalated privledges to run. And they ran them under the administrator account.
They were not infections from web sites (which IE8 has sandboxing for), not infections over network, and no AV system in place. It stopped 3 of them with UAC, but the others ran, because they did not need to escalate.
Linux analogy. If I wrote a script saying "\rm -rf ~" would you expect the OS to stop it? Same deal.