- http://news.com.com/2102-1029_3-5423306.html?tag=st.util.print
October 24, 2004
A study of home PCs released on Monday found that about 80 percent had been infected with spyware almost entirely unbeknownst to their users. The study, funded by America Online and the National Cyber Security Alliance, found home users mostly unprotected from online threats and largely ignorant to the dangers. AOL and the NCSA sent technicians to 329 homes to inspect computers....Nearly three in five users do not know the difference between a firewall and antivirus software. Desktop firewall software regulates which applications on a PC can communicate across the network, while antivirus software detects malicious code that attempts to run on a computer, typically by pattern matching. Two-thirds of users don't have a firewall installed on their computer, and while 85 percent of PC owners had installed antivirus software, two-thirds of them had not updated the software in the last week. The study found one in five users had an active virus on their machines...The 329-person study found that, while eight of 10 users had spyware, the vast majority of them--nearly 90 percent--had no inkling that their systems had picked up a digital hitchhiker...
Note:What is interesting is that sites like this one that deal with such issues have known this for quite some time. And our user base of infected users is much larger.
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Posted on Monday, 25 October 2004 @ 19:20:12 UTC by Paul (1367 reads) [ Trackback ]
