News Nearly a third of PCs in Europe infected by viruses

Nearly a third of PCs in Europe are reportedly infected, despite many having anti-virus software.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/02/10/a-third-of-pcs-in-europe-infected-by-viruse/1

 

Goes to show yet again that the only variable that really affects infection rates is the user.

 

Indeed, I've lost count of the number of times I've heard "my pc/laptop is slowing down, can you repair it or should I get a new one".

How about keeping your anti-virus definitions up to date and stop going on dodgy sites you doofus?


PCs (except rarely) don't "slow down" from a physical defect, it's the crap the user downloads that's the problem!

I wonder just how many PC/laptops purchases could be avoided just be wiping the HD and reinstalling the OS & apps? Quite a few IMHO.

 

User problem, i've seen this countless of times!!!

I remember this particular occasion when a cousin of mine was checking his email at my pc while also chating on messenger, then I see some dude sends to my cousin one of those annoying messages "hey, check this really funny video" and the message linked to an ".exe" file, damn I got pissed when I noticed my cousin was about to click on the thing, Fortunately I was able to stop him

 

That's why all my pr0n websites have been thoroughly tested, personally, for evils.

 

Theres filth to be DL/ed and were all duuurrrtttyyyyyy. CONFESS!!!!!

 

It doesn't matter whether you watch pron or not, you simply need to be careful what sites you visit. And you need to know what sort of programs and browser plug-ins to use to protect yourself. What with my plug-ins, anti virus and firewall all running nothing gets through that shouldn't. I can't remember the last time I had a virus. I don't get malware / ad ware either.

 

Blame to keygens they now have virus FOR REAL (period!).

 

i'm interested in what the rest of the world is at. i would think the US would have a percentage just as high as those. i'm even more interested to know how much each OS is affected.

 

I don't think Microsoft would like those figures, sorry someone had to say it ^_^

 

I use sandboxie when I'm online with up to date avg except when I use steam and have never had a virus "touch wood"

 

having an anti-virus dosnt mean that you wont get viruses, it just means that they get rid of viruses the developers have seen and have added to the database
and your lucky if you have a computer for a year without a major virus if you believe an antivirus will save you

its like trying to defend yourself from a bear that is attacking you and trying to kill it with poison
yes you may survive and it may die but not before it takes a bite out of you in the least

antiviruses are not the answer we need more hips (host-based intrution pretectio systems) in place to stop them infecting pc's

 

Usenet indexing sites - pr0n with the viruses (allegedly )

Kneel before SandboxIE for it is your saviour!
Some keygens have always been infected, some still are not.

 

honestly with security essentials I don't understand how things couldn't get better in the future. It works great and doesn't eat any ressources

 

There should be a license requirement for owning and operating a PC. To be renewed every 2 years, you have to hand in your old computer to get the license as well. It saddens me that a uneducated/uncaring group of people can hold back PCs (and more importantly Gaming!)

Yours in Competent Gaming Plasma,
Star*Dagger

 

you cant be serious

its a good anitivirus dont get me wrong

but its slower than trying to download 100gb over dialup
becasue it is designed to never use mroe than 50% of resources it takes absolutly ages

it took over 4 hours to scan my c drive (200 odd gb used from a 400gb partition) before i canceled it
im comodo all the way now it is so much quicker, it has a firewall,antivirus and sandbox built in

as well as a program that moniters accses to every file so viruses do not get activated at all, and no one can remotly accses pc if you dont want them to becasue it treats all program and files as "guility until proved inocent"
which is the opersit of nearly all antiviruses availible

 

Please guys, cite your sources!! The Beeb are just as guilty here, as they didn't provide any links to the "survey" either (in fact, the Beeb is far more guilty that bit could ever be - this kind of thing is endemic in BBC News stories). If you're going to report on a "survey" or a "report" or a "study", then please provide a frikkin' link, or at least tell me the author names and the publication date! Sure I could try and look it up, but how will I know if I've got the right one if I'm not told what to look for? And is it *really* that hard to add a link these days, even in HTML code?

200,000 PCs across 27 EU countries; that's just under 7,500 PCs per country. It might be a significant enough number to be able to draw rudimentary conclusions from, but without more detail I don't trust the conclusions at all. That might not necessarily be a representative sample for countries with a larger number of computer users per capita.

I want to know: how many respondents were surveyed, what was the response rate, were the questions open-ended or yes/no answers (i.e. were the questions open to interpretation), what was the distribution across the countries (i.e., were there more responses in the UK than in France), what were the target demographics, was demographic information even collected/analysed, what estimates or figures were given for the number of computers per capita per country, were the IT departments surveyed or end users, was this private companies, was this civil service/government agencies, was this EU agencies, if it was private companies then what market sectors were surveyed, what is classified as a "virus", do they distinguish between viruses trojans or rootkits, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...

In short.... I WANT THE FRIKKIN' DATA!

 

Nearly a third of Europe's PCs were cleared of a virus last year

see I fixed that for you

 

Hear hear! This article is sensationalist at best. If we are going to make some guesses based on data that we DO have available:

http://europa.eu/abc/keyfigures/sizeandpopulation/howmany/index_en.htm

495,000,000 people living in the EU.

How many people living in the EU have a computer? What's a fair estimation? 1%? That's more than fair, in my opinion, considering some businesses and households have more than 1 computer per user. Do servers count also? Or just personal PCs? Anyway, 1% is much more than fair.

That's 4,950,000 computers. 200,000 as a percentage of 4,950,000 is about 4%.

Does that mean that this "statistic" is only 4% accurate?

Pfffffffff.

 

Typical P.E.B.C.A.K. error...

(Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard)

/I'll get my coat...