Now that Microsoft Security Essentials is generally available to consumers in 19 countries, Microsoft've had a chance to go over the data, and there are some very interesting results.
The free (for windows users ) antivirus and anti malware suit has seen well over 1.5 million downloads in its first week.
Up to October 6th, Microsoft recorded almost four million detections on 535,752 distinct machines. The detections are eight times the machine count because many computers are infected with multiple threats.
Microsoft Security Essentials is available in 8 languages and 19 markets at RTM, which covers a lot of the PC using world.
Looking at counts of computers reporting detections by threat categories, Microsoft found that the order is different in each of the top three countries. Trojans are the top detected category in the US, China has lots of potentially unwanted software threats, and worms (particularly Conficker) are very active in Brazil. There are also many exploits being encountered in China, which may mean these PCs do not have the latest security updates.
