Related Articles
Top Stories
May 27 2012 11:21
There's a price war raging between South Africa's cellphone networks after Cell C lowered the rates of its prepaid calls by more than 34%.
May 27 2012 13:09
The oversupply of golf estates has claimed another victim.
May 28 2012 07:53
The City of Cape Town has spent R175m running the Myciti bus service since the Soccer World Cup compared to an income of R35m, a report says.
San Francisco - Microsoft said on Thursday that cybercriminals are already hawking booby-trapped versions of just-released Windows 7 operating system software.
"It's so important for customers to get their copies of Windows from a trusted source," Joe Williams, general manager, Worldwide Genuine Windows at Microsoft, said in an interview posted at the company's official website.
"In the last few days we've seen reports of illegitimate distributions of the release candidate of our latest Windows operating system, Windows 7, being offered in a way that is designed to infect a customer's PC with malware."
A nearly-final version of Windows 7 made its world debut on Tuesday, giving people a chance to tell Microsoft what they love or hate about the new-generation operating system.
Microsoft is making Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) available as it puts finishing touches on the operating system that will replace Vista.
The US software colossus has touted anti-piracy protections it built into Windows 7 to thwart the spread of illegal copies of the operating system.
Windows 7 anti-piracy guards build on technology built into Vista, according to Williams. For example, pop-up boxes will warn people when unauthorised copies of software are spied on computers.
"With Windows Vista, we made significant strides in reducing the threat pirated copies posed to customers, our partners and Microsoft software, and we anticipate we'll do even better with Windows 7," Williams said.
Microsoft decried software piracy as a pervasive problem that costs the world economy more than $45bn annually and exposes users to risks of identity theft, system crashes, and data loss.
Williams said Microsoft research shows that as many as a third of the company's customers worldwide may be running counterfeit copies of Windows.
"We see many cases of customers who wanted to buy genuine software and believed they did, only to find out later that they were victims of software piracy," Williams said.
Windows operating systems are used in about 90% of the world's computers, according to industry figures.