Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system has been released already for businesses (and beta testers who got a free copy of Vista Ultimate/Business), but the rest of us will have to wait until January 30, 2007 to get our retail copies. Within the next year, Microsoft is projected to ship roughly 90 million copies of Vista within the first year alone.

In the mean time, Microsoft has been testing Vista's defenses to the top malware threats as reported by Sophos on November 30. The results from Microsoft's internal testing were quite promising according to Jim Allchin.

Testing showed that when using a clean install of Windows Vista with no third-party security applications installed, Vista was immune to all ten of the malware threats.

When using Outlook or third-party email applications which prevent users from running executables known to be malware threats, Vista was protected eight out of ten times. Bagle-Zip and Mydoom-O were the culprits in this test. Microsoft contends that it's not the fault of the Windows Vista operating system, but rather a function of the email program and users who open up suspicious .ZIP files and then run the executables found within.

It's interesting to note that Windows Mail, which comes standard with Vista, blocks .ZIP attachments. Microsoft's Outlook client does not do the same. Microsoft does note, however, that email clients can support .ZIP blocking via its Attachment Manager API.

Jim Allchin in closing gives these tips for users to abide by when it comes to Windows Vista:  1) stay on top of security updates, 2) use a firewall and 3) use anti-virus software. All of these are pretty much common sense -- however, if common sense was employed more often in computing, we wouldn't have large malware breakouts via email in the first place.