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Rosa Golijan

Microsoft: One out of 14 downloads is malicious

According to research conducted by Microsoft, about one of every 14 programs downloaded turns out to be malware.

PC Mag reports that this rather frightening factoid was revealed in blog post intended to praise the SmartScreen Application Reputation feature — a service which confirms whether a download is being provided by a reputable source — in Microsoft's own Internet Explorer 9. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

It seems that in the process of fine-tuning and operating services like SmartScreen, Microsoft "found that 1 out of every 14 programs downloaded is later confirmed as malware." Of course this information appears to be based on the experiences of individuals who use Internet Explorer 9 as well as SmartScreen, so we can't assume that statistics wouldn't vary among users of other browsers.

What we can take away from the whole thing is that we should use common sense and pay attention to what we're downloading — and where we're downloading it from.

Related stories:

• Study: 99% of Android phones vulnerable to attack
• Study: Android malware up 400 percent
• Malware attack specifically targets Mac users

Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's obsessed with Twitter and loves to be liked on Facebook.