NEWS
Despite an ever-increasing amount of malware in the wild, almost four in ten respondents to a silicon.com poll have never been hit by a virus.
The poll, which asked readers when their PC was last infected, found 39 per cent of respondents claim their machine has never fallen victim to a virus, while a further 41 per cent of people's PCs were last infected between one and five years ago.
The poll suggests that successful virus attacks could be becoming less common, or that anti-virus packages are stopping the malware before it has a chance to cause problems: only eight per cent of those who responded said they have been infected by a virus in the last year, a further eight per cent in the last six months with another five per cent reporting having been hit in the last month.
The news comes against a background of high-profile infections, with a number of public sector bodies being hit by the Conficker worm. Conficker has in the past infected several public sector computer networks, including computer systems at Westminster.
Malware, meanwhile, continues to grow. Recent research by security software firm Symantec shows that the number of new security threats rose from 624,267 in 2007 to 1,656,227 in 2008.
Malware may be on the rise, but it seems some now consider viruses only a minor danger to corporate security. Another recent poll by silicon.com found that 62 per cent of techies consider malicious or incompetent staff as the biggest threat to their organisation's IT security, ahead of viruses with nine per cent.
Comments
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1. anonymous
I would be curious to know what that percentage was even a year ago. I suspect many more than 40% had never had a virus until this year. The disturbing thought is that if this information is taken at face value, then 60% of people have had a virus. This on top of the fact that I am not convinced that all users would even be aware they were infected.
2. Tom Kelchner, Sunbelt Software
I wish this was true; however, people who read Silicon.com are probably much more careful with computer security than those who don’t. Those who voted are much more likely to run an anti-virus solution on their PC, with current signatures and keep their operating system and other applications up with necessary security updates.
There will also be a geographical skew as countries such as China - running pirated versions of Windows, with no security updates - are not part of this picture.
There also has to be a lot of computer users out there whose PCs are part of a botnet, blissfully unaware that their machines are running a bit slow because they’re busy pouring out spam emails advertising “male enhancement” products.
I don’t think it’s time to get complacent about security. As a matter of fact, I don’t think it’s even time to even be optimistic.
3. Roy Corneloues
I also think you need to take in to consideration the audience which you polled...
As pretty much all of us are IT professionals - or at least very IT savvy - we are the ones who take extra care in what we do: the web sites we visit, the files we download, even as far as leaving the annoying UAC on in Vista because we know the job it is doing...
Ask this question to a more mainstream audience - the typical "consumer" and the response will be much, much higher...
4. Ollie Clark
Come on. The people who read Silicon.com and respond to polls about virus infections are hardly typical users. We're all by definition much less likely to be hit by a virus infection so it's no surprise to me that 40% of us have never had a virus.
If you ask the readers of Knitting Monthly I think the results might be a bit different.
5. anonymous
Not trying to appear smug/gloating.smartarse....but...
- Get a Wireless Router
- Enable Encryption
- Enable the Firewall
- Get some Anti-Virus
- Keep you Anti-Virus very regularly up to date
- Get Some Anti Spyware
- Keep your Anti-Spyware very regularly up to date
- Run AV/Spyware scans on a daily basis
- Set Auto-updates to run and install
...and you'd be surprised how much this reduces the incidences of infection.
I've lost count of the number of 'friends' PC's I have cleansed because they are over-ran with infections because that have been to lazy/mean to replace their expired trial AV software - even with free stuff like AVG of Microsofrt Essentials.
Keeps me in beer for little overall effort.....
1. Clean - Sunbelt Free VIPRE Rescue
2. Repair - Activate Auto-Updates
3. Protect - Install AVG Free
4. Hello Stella !
6. Nick Cole
Silicon readers are informed and therefore not representive of the majority. How many of those who think they haven't had a virus or any other malware really haven't. How do they know there isn't something lurking somewhere?
The best and honest answer is that they don't know!
However, the real question is for those who had one, was it brought to your attention before it infected your system, or did it actually get in, and then how long before you noticed and were able to deal with it.
Nobody is immune.