Microsoft’s efforts to limit the ongoing damage from worms such as Blaster will not pay off for several years, according to security experts. New Windows PCs will begin shipping with security switched on by default for the first time, with the release of Windows XP Service Pack 2 this summer, but it will take five or six years before such basic protections are common on the installed base of PCs, according to a Symantec executive. Such unprotected PCs are increasingly being used to spread worms such as Blaster and junk email, usually without the PC owner’s knowledge; a recent Symantec survey found that a system will, on average, receive a Blaster-generated packet of data within one second of connecting to the Internet. “The threat will reduce slowly as we start to have security more widespread,” Nigel Beighton, Symantec’s director of community defence, told Techworld. “The industry has learned it has to ship technology with security switched on. But right now there are millions of Windows 98 users still out there, there is still a huge number of legacy PCs around, and it will take five or six years for that situation to change.” Full Story