Ron Schenone

22 Million Computers Scanned Found A 48% Infection Rate, Lucky Us!

Posted by on Feb 1, 2010 | 4 Comments

In a recent report in which some 22 million computers were scanned for infections of various types, some 48% were found to be infected. It is still hard to believe that after all these years that people still fail to protect themselves.

“Though the scanning system checks for many different kinds of potentially unwanted software, for this report, Panda Labs has segmented out ‘Downloaders’ and ‘Banking Trojans/Password Stealers’ as they are most often associated with financial crimes such as automated phishing schemes.

The proportion of infected computers detected has decreased for the first time in 2009. In the same way, the proportion of banking Trojans has decreased from a 16.94 percent in Q2 to 15.89 percent in Q3. The proportion of Downloaders has dropped to 8.39 percent from 11.44 percent in Q2 ? but it is still higher than in Q1 (4.22%).”

The unfortunate fact is that these infected people are the same folks that send you and I emails or other attachments. Lucky us.

What can we do to stop the tide of infections? Not much. Wish those infected good thoughts and just keep your own system clean. LOL

Source in .pdf format

  • http://justenrobertson.com Justen

    In nature, the main line of defense against disease is diversity. The more homogeneous a species, the more likely a single disease can affect a large portion of the population. The immune system helps to fight against disease, but when the immune system itself lacks diversity it becomes the first and most obvious point of attack: find a vulnerability in immunity and the host organisms are yours.

    This model maps well to computing. It is much more effective to write malware for the largely homogeneous Windows population, even with its handful of relatively powerful immune systems, than to try to target the hundreds of varieties of *nix based operating systems (Mac, as a BSD derivative, falls into this category), each with their own unique vulnerabilities. These systems don’t require an extraordinarily powerful immune system because none of them represent a broad enough demographic to be candidates for infection; disease is not able to thrive in such individualized environments, so while the cures may come slower the communicability of disease is minuscule.

    There is no reason to believe that this natural order is going to change any time soon. Unfortunately because we operate in shared space on the network, mass infections cause a burden even to those system which are not directly affected, by way of reduced bandwidth and waste of mindshare. We seem to be compelled to adopt diversity as a strategy, and take Windows-based systems for what they are: a breeding ground for infections that causes a disproportionately large burden on the network.

    Making bigger, better anti-viruses is not a viable option; nor is spreading awareness. That strategy has had 15 years to be tested and it has made no significant progress (in fact things have gotten progressively worse). Meanwhile those of us who have seen the better path still struggle under the weight of those who have not.

  • KG

    “It is still hard to believe that after all these years that people still fail to protect themselves.”

    Not really. The vast majority of computer users aren’t really interested in the computer as such, like you and I. By and large all they are concerned with is browsing the Internet and communicating with others with computers.

    The average computer user has heard of viruses, trojans, and the other malware, and they have heard of computer security and taking precautions against being infected. But they generally will slip into the mindset that, if it is ignored then it doesn’t exist. That works until their computer becomes infected, then they act as if they just “don’t know how it could have happened!”

    The owners of the 52% of computers that weren’t infected will generally fall into two categories; those that have learned the lesson of security (usually the hard way) and those that have been extremely lucky.

    Of course, there is one other small subset, probably not included in the statistics; those who use an alternative OS to Windows. A good choice for avoiding malware…so far…but unlikely to continue to be, unless everyone starts to take security more seriously. Even Linux, BSD, et. al., is not completely immune to these issues.

  • http://babydesertwolf.blogspot.com/ The Rookie Blogger

    that’s the power of the internet… it helps us in our daily lives but most viruses came from this technology… ahehehehe

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