Microsoft has been making much of its newfound focus on security, but a top Microsoft official now says spyware has become so insidious that businesses need to invest in a new solution — tools to automatically reformat hard disks and reinstall Windows.

Mike Danseglio, program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft, had this startling statement at the InfoSec World conference, according to eWeek, “When you are dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch. In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit.”

Danseglio pointed to one instance in which 2,000 PCs in a federal government agency were infested with spyware, and the only solution was wiping out and rebuliding the systems. The agency, he noted, struggled with finding a way to do that automatically.

Danseglio says that in response to spyware, businesses need to invest in tools that can wipe disks and automatically reinstall Windows.

But he has it wrong. The real problem here isn’t that businesses don’t have adequate tools — it’s that Windows is too vulnerable to spyware, and Microsoft isn’t doing enough about it. Microsoft security officials should be locking down Windows, not telling businesses they need to figure out ways to wipe their systems clean and do reinstalls because Microsoft isn’t doing its job well enough.