U.S. Ranks 9th in Global PC Infection Report

http://www.pandasecurity.com/usa/homeusers/media/press-releases/viewnews?noticia=9874

 

Interesting.

Canada and England a good 10 points behind the US. I personally would not have expected that. Scandinavian countries even further back. Hum.

Thanks for posting this info.

Later...

 

thanks for the info

 

Pardon my curiosity, but may I ask why you would not have expected that?

 

Culturally speaking I had always put Canada, Britain, and the US on par with each other as far as surfing habits go. Westernized nations, alike-people, and all that. But obviously I was wrong in that assumption. You Canadians and Brits, as a whole, are a bit more cautious than we click-happy Americans. . But of course, Scandinavian countries put us all to shame as far as being knowledgeable/cautious to cyber threats. That is, as a whole.

Later...

 

Unless I am misinterpreting the stats, what I find impossible to comprehend is the suggestion that 50% (or 40% or 60%, it doesn't matter) of computers being scanned by Panda are genuinely infected.. Am I missing something..??

I appreciate that the "population total" in this case appears to comprise "those people who went to Panda to have a scan carried out" (or does it also include people that use their products routinely?), where people are more likely to have a scan performed if they think there is a problem, and so it should in any case be a distorted statistic?

But despite all that it seems an impossibly high ratio - and across all countries (ignoring the relatively minor variations)..!? I guess the variations between countries may also have something to do with "at what stage someone typically might have a computer scanned" (which may itself be cultural), rather say than provide meaningful info as to real differences between countries' overall infection rates..

 

No, I think we're just as click-happy as anyone But 10% isn't all that significant, I suppose.

I'm as surprised as you are on that stat, although I wonder if a lot of those "infected" are just false +'s?

 

good piece of info

 

I'm having trouble convincing myself that > 50% of PC's out there are infected with some sort of malware. That number just seems very high to me. I can see 50% having downloaded some file that, once scanned, was shown to have malware in it, but to me that is not the same as saying the computer is infected. Once scanned it may have been removed and never installed which I would then personally not count as infected.

 

Admittedly, we who post here fairly regularly probably can't be considered "average" or "typical" users -- we wouldn't be here if we weren't interested in computer security.

There's been threads and polls here (none recent, that I can remember) asking how long since we were last infected. In my own case, the last almost-incident was a few years back and involved Spyware Guard (I think it was, back when I still had it) warning me about an attempted change to my home (blank) page. And I'm pretty sure that was simply me, accidentally clicking on the link to do that on a page I was visiting.

To the best of my memory, the last real infection I encountered goes back to before I even had internet access, and that's nearly 15 years now.