Worldwide threats from malicious software that cripple computers with spy programs, viruses and worms have increased 43 per cent over the past year, Microsoft said Monday in its Security Intelligence Report.

The software giant said that the rise occurred despite a significant improvement in the security of its operating systems, as hackers targeted individual programs and naïve users.

However, the report show that hackers encounter more problems when trying to break into Vista operated computers than when attempting to break into XP. The report is backed up by statistics showing that more computers running on XP have been infected by malware, viruses and have been taken over by hackers than Vista running machines.
Microsoft reported a number of 77 vulnerabilities from January to June, which is less from what the reports show for the last six months of 2007.
In 2007 there have been 116 vulnerabilities reported and this year’s decrease clearly shows that Microsoft software is becoming better protected.

The report shows that XP operating system is more frequently attacked than Windows Vista which means that the latter is safer and harder to break into by hackers. In XP running computers, 42% of the vulnerabilities belonged to system flaws and weaknesses and 58% were caused by installed malicious programs. On the other hand, for Vista there has been reported that only 6% of the vulnerabilities belonged to the software, while the other 94% were caused by third-party software.
The report indicated that malware infection rates are generally higher in developing countries than in developed ones. Infection rates range from 1.8 for every 1,000 computers in Japan to above 76.4 for every 1,000 in Afghanistan.

The United States had an infection rate of 11.2 infected computers for every 1,000 scanned - an increase of 25.5 percent in the last six months.

Microsoft recommended a number of protective steps that computer users should take: Checking for security updates from Microsoft and third-party software providers, installing up-to-date firewalls and antivirus and anti-spyware programs, and exercising extreme caution in opening links and attachments embedded in emails, even if the email is from a trusted source.

The highest number of exploits has been noticed on operating systems as Windows 2000 or Windows server 2003 and, according to Microsoft, hackers seem to prefer operating systems which have their language set on Chinese. The report shows that 47% of all browser related attacks have been on systems that had the main language set on Chinese.