Malware on Vista

[Negeva]

Been trying to do some research of late into the levels of malware infections on Vista based machines. Most of the links and articles are about how the UAC is supposed to protect users from infection and then the rest are how an infection can occur due to the 'click-monkey' mentality that some users have developed due to the UAC.

Has anyone suffered or know if someone has been infected using Vista; if so how and as much detail as possible, if you please.

If someone has links to further my reading please post.

[sbailey12]

No major malware on my machine. Just ran a scan today with A-Squared and had only 1 cookie it recongnized as a low threat, no other threats detected. I run no resident Anti-Virus or Spyware, I do scan periodically, every week or two.

[Negeva]

Thanks for the reply, but to be honest cookies don't concern me. Cleaning out your internet cache removes them. I'm really after things like the Vundo virus etc stories

[Panama Red]

I know you're looking for stories of infection but here's another that stays clean. I run Vista Ultimate with the UAC turned off but Windows Defender enabled. The only things found by my scanners are cookies also.

[usnavyretired]

Because of market share I think XP is still the target of choice but it's only a matter of time before Vista starts feeling the onslaught. If more of corporate business was using Vista we might see more attempts to hack the system.

[kilgoretrout]

Most trojans, viruses, and other malware are designed to run across the board on al NT kernel windows boxes and most, but not all, will run on vista as well as winxp and win2k. The problem you will find in asking people about malware infection is that the ones that are knowledgeable enough to know whether or not they are infected are the same ones that take reasonable precautions to insure they don't get infected. Those that are clueless have a box load of malware and never know it; they just complain that there system is running slow or other symptoms that they never connect to malware infestation.
As far as UAC goes, I think it's helpful, at least for knowledgeable users, since it lets you know when something is trying to execute that shouldn't be executing. For the less knowledgeable, I can see how you can get the click monkey response since they have no reasonable way of evaluating what should be allowed to execute and will quickly just allow anything to execute.

[usnavyretired]

While most malware will run on the NT kernel, Vista has several security features that make most XP era malware tough to penetrate it. The BitLocker Drive Encryption is one feature if it is enabled on the Ultimate and Business version's. Another is the integrity level built into user processes preventing a lower level process from intergriting with a higher level process. Address Space Layout Randomization makes it much harder for malware to infest the system plus numerous other features. Is Vista impenetrable, of course not, no such thing as perfect software but it sure beats its predecessors.

[Lespaul20]

Actually, BitLocker only on Ultimate and Enterprise, not Business. I think kilgoretrout has the basic idea.

[usnavyretired]

Yea, brains thinking one thing and fingers typin another, thanks for the fix.