NEWS A record number of China's computers have been hit by viruses this year, according to a ministry survey.
About 85 per cent of computers in China were affected by viruses in 2003. This is 1.5 percentage points higher than 2002 and 25.5 percentage points higher than 2001, said the survey.
Carried out by the Ministry of Public Security, the survey was carried out over May and June this year, according to official news agency Xinhua.
Some 63 per cent of users surveyed said they suffered losses as a result of viruses, a slight drop compared with a year ago.
Infected downloads, booby-trapped websites and email attachments were the main avenues of infection for those surveyed.
Ignorance and lack of defensive tools are the reasons behind the high infection rate, said Xinhua.
Earlier this year, the Slammer and Blaster worms hit China hard, thanks to poor awareness of network security in the country. In addition, there have been theories that a large number of viruses in the wild come from hacker groups based in China.
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1. George Lien
I doubt many viruses come from within China, as its citizens dare not to break any law due to the mere fact that their actions may cost them their lives.
One thing for sure though is that these people deserve to lose their valuable time and money because they most likely did not pay for their software.
As some people would always say: "there is no such thing as free lunch."
2. David Johnston
If the world would just move over to linux we would not have any more problems I say this not as it wont happen or it is 100% safe but it gets fixed in no time at all AND IT IS FREE
But Bill you still pay my bills so keep up the bad work