Malicious Software Strikes One Irish PC-user out of every 4

According to Amarach Research, which recently conducted a survey for ESET the anti-virus vendor, one computer-user in Ireland out of every 4 has sometime encountered a crash-down of his PC alternatively virus/other malicious program attack, whilst one user out of every 5 encountered an infection or data-theft incidence on his PC.

The survey polled 852 people from every age-group across Ireland, seeking their remarks about 6 separate statements concerning malware like viruses, scam e-mails, hacking, ID-theft, botnets and social media.

Consequently, Amarach discovered that 14% of those surveyed encountered a hack alternatively suffered a compromise of the accounts they had on social-networking websites. And almost each 10th individual became a subject of deception, suffered exploitation of their private information or payment cards, alternatively had spam distributed from their computers unknowingly.

The survey further found that around 40% of respondents felt that they could be easily victimized with any alternative from those they were requested for remarking about, implying that either they don't have faith in their anti-virus safeguards alternatively they don't know about the inadequacy of their safety measures in relation to the attacks they encounter. Conversely, not fully 4% felt that none of the above attacks could target them, whilst 33% felt that it was either not simple alternatively quite improbable that they would be victimized.

Moreover, the demographic analysis pertaining to respondents disclosed that while the targeting of females and males was randomly done, though in identical rates, people in the age-group 15-24 encountered the maximum PC-crashes, ID-theft from social media accounts, and virus contaminations.

The older generation (45-54 years-of-age) had the maximum number of credit card and data theft encounters.

Urban Schrott, cyber-crime analyst at ESET, Ireland sated that the above could suggest that younger persons were inclined to operating PCs chiefly for social-media, entertainment and gaming. A probable result related to pirated movies, music and games, contaminating the younger people with malware, whilst browsing social-networking websites could make them ID-theft preys. But regarding adults, they were more inclined to bank and shop over the Internet, thereby potentially enabling abuse of their financial data, Schrott explained. Siliconrepublic.com published this, October 4, 2011.

Related article: Malicious Scripts with Zero-byte Padding can Pass Undetected

» SPAMfighter News - 10/12/2011