Antivirus company Avast Software released some interesting news about the dangers of rootkits and where they are being found with increasing frequency.

According to the company, the decade-old Windows XP platform makes up the largest reservoir of infected PC in the world; and interesting enough, or worrisome depending on your point of view, the number of infected XP machines are out of proportion with the operating systems market share. This is the findings from the company after survey over 600,000 Windows machines.

Avast attributed the infection disparity between XP and Windows 7 to a pair of factors: The widespread use of pirated copies of the former and the latter’s better security.

“According to our stats, as many as a third of XP users are running SP2 [Service Pack 2] or earlier,” said Ondrej Vlcek, the chief technology officer of AVAST, in an interview Thursday. “Millions of people are out of support and their machines are unpatched.”

Vlcek assumed that many of the people running XP SP2, which Microsoftstopped supporting with security patches a year ago, have declined to update to the still-supported SP3 because they are running counterfeits.

via Computerworld

This is going to be an even bigger problem once XP with SP2 installed, reach end of life and Microsoft stops supporting it.

[Cross-posted at Winextra]