Microsoft recently released its Security Intelligence Report Version 4 on April 22 at the Infosecurity Europe event in London. This is no light reading folks, its a big report about 104 pages long, but there are some really interesting facts inside...

• Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) data shows that the infection rate for Windows Vista–based computers is
  60.5 percent less than that of computers running Windows XP SP2, and 91.5 percent
  less than the infection rate for Windows XP with no service packs installed.
• Microsoft has filed nearly 250 legal actions worldwide against spammers, often working
  with law enforcement officials in the United States, Europe, the Asia-Pacific region,
  and South America.
• Phishing is still predominantly an English-language phenomenon. Typically,
  75–80 percent of the active phishing pages tracked by the Microsoft Phishing Filter
  at a given moment in 2H07 were English-language pages.

There is also some interesting data on what sort of detections Windows Live Care came across on Software...

This is where you really need to be careful of pirate software. A report from IDC iterated the risks of pirate software in the enterprise, some of the points from that report highlight this;

• 25% of the Web sites we accessed offering counterfeit product keys, pirated
  software, key generators or crack tools attempted to install either malicious or
  potentially unwanted software. There are a significant number of sites that will
  attempt to install malicious or unwanted code.
• 11% of the key generators and crack tools downloaded from Web sites and 59%
  of the key generators and crack tools downloaded from peer-to-peer networks
  contained either malicious or potentially unwanted software. There is a  significant amount of malicious or unwanted code to be found in key generators
  and crack tools.
• The cost to organizations to recover from a single incident of malicious software
  on a single workstation can run over a thousand dollars. The cost to
  organizations from lost or compromised data can run into the tens of thousands
  of dollars per incident. The "savings" of using pirated software can be wiped out
  with a single security breach.

The IDC report can be found here.

To read more, click the link below and find out more about the research conducted between July 2007 to December 2007, and be aware of the security threats in our industry.

Microsoft Malware Protection Center - Security Intelligence Report