[identity profile] valiskeogh.livejournal.com posting in [community profile] techrecovery
Plague carriers Most users unaware of PC infections Tech News on ZDNet
A study of home PCs released on Monday found that about 80 percent had been infected with spyware almost entirely unbeknownst to their users.
The study, funded by America Online and the National Cyber Security Alliance, found home users mostly unprotected from online threats and largely ignorant to the dangers. AOL and the NCSA sent technicians to 329 homes to inspect computers.
Nearly three in five users do not know the difference between a firewall and antivirus software. Desktop firewall software regulates which applications on a PC can communicate across the network, while antivirus software detects malicious code that attempts to run on a computer, typically by pattern matching. Two-thirds of users don't have a firewall installed on their computer, and while 85 percent of PC owners had installed antivirus software, two-thirds of them had not updated the software in the last week. The study found one in five users had an active virus on their machines.



if you look to the bottom of the story, first comment is by me.

i'm not sure who is more stupid... the computer users in the study... or the AOL people who needed a study to find this out...

valis

Date: 2004-10-25 11:04 am (UTC)
jecook: (Default)
From: [personal profile] jecook
Fully 90% of my trouble tickets have at least minimal involement of spyware. And for machines on dialup, it truely sucks.

Unfortunatly, Boss won't let me fix it by disableing Internet explorer and putting something like Firefox on instead, as he wants to do "neat tricks" with .net and automated rollouts and crap, which probably don't need IE as the default browser.

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