25% Internet Users Disable Anti-Viruses; Reports Avira

According to the security company Avira, which recently conducted a survey, 25% of Internet users said that they disabled their anti-virus applications, once if not more, during 2009 as a way to enhance their computers' performance.

Stated data security investigator Sorin Mustaca of Avira within the report, the survey outcomes lucidly indicated that vendors required being careful about security software not being excessively burdened with features that might have considerable impact on the functioning of computers. ESecurity Planet reported this on December 16, 2010.

Mustaca said that ultimately, so far as security was concerned, it was more appropriate to have least safeguards that remained unnoticed compared to noisy safeguards that users tended to turn off so they could operate their PCs peacefully. But, deactivating anti-viruses wasn't advisable as that could expose computers to malware threats as plain as computer viruses enabling people with malicious intent to add the affected systems to a botnet for executing phishing and distributing malicious software, he explained.

Indeed, security company Avira's experts cited scareware the fake anti-virus software, which ran false malware scans and deceived users into purchasing the useless program, as one more explanation why a lot of people avoided security applications in general. Reportedly, during 2009, scareware distributors made over $300m in earnings via the execution of such bogus AV scams.

Furthermore according to Avira, 12.01% or so of respondents felt that it was better not to go online for safety reasons i.e. for keeping the possibilities of becoming targets of malware reduced.

Nonetheless, it's encouraging to find that 62.84% of survey participants actually ran multiple security programs on their PCs over the year. Moreover, as spam and malware rose to unprecedented heights during 2010, the majority of end-users realize the dangers inevitable by not deploying anti-malware programs alternatively turning them off intermittently for boosting browsing and processing pace.

Stated Mustaca, it wasn't astonishing that end-users ran more than one security program per year, as everybody tried discovering an appropriate security application that could well balance the safety of a PC with the resource usage of that system. Business Wire reported this on December 16, 2010.

Related article: “Loopholes did not cause online banking thefts”: ICBC

» SPAMfighter News - 12/29/2010