Half of all computers have malware on them...

General Topics
1

Hi malware fighters,

Look here: http://www.security.nl/popup/2539
For us here it is an open door…
Almost half of all scanned 22 million computers in more than a hundred nations has malware on them, according to Panda Security collecting these numbers for the Anti-Phishing Working Group. For the first time these numbers went down slightly during the final quarter of 2009. The first half of the previous year showed 54,5%, while during the next quarter of the year this went down to 48,35%. Panda while scanning also looked for drive-by-downloads and banking Trojans, where numbers for these segments also came down,

polonus

2

Thanks so much polonus. Chances are…you may even have malware on your pc that hasn’t been discovered…just sitting and waiting. Thank goodness for those that fight the good fight eh? ^.^

3

Hi news,

Let it not ruin your day. We always will have those APTs waiting for us…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Persistent_Threat

And it is very, very difficult and almost impossible to remove these kind of threats,

http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2010/01/look-beyond-exploit.html

polonus (malware fighter)

4

my first reaction when I read the title of this thread was: “no that’s impossible”…and giving it a second thought, yeah of course that’s possible, considering how a majority of lambda users run their PCs, I’m not surprised at all. Could be even more than half of them. The problem there is more what stands between the chair and the keyboard than the malware easily taking advantage of the situation.
There are so many people not updating Windows, not having or not updating anti-virus/spyware, running Internet Explorer, using Windows firewall with default settings (especially dangerous in XP, and XP still = 70% of Windows market), + no script blocker + a tendency to click on all sorts of pop ups + another tendency to reply to spam/scam mails etc…etc…etc…
So that in fact this assessment that it’s just half of the computers that are infected is indeed quite optimistic don’t you think ? :smiley:

5

Hi Logos,

Yes you can extrapolate it to the total Window machine population. Do not forget that because of overall cost-based reasons and mitigation problems inside corporations a lot of the community is still using the 12 year old IE6 on a XP machine with or without SP2 and 3, whole nations on non-genuine pirated XP versions or almost genuine but pirated lookalikes (with more holes and security issues accordingly) and our views are even to be presented optimistically. Again I get a warm feeling that avast at least has saved the 100.000 that come here and we have a chance to educate to use safer practices,

your anti-malware fighting friend,

polonus

6

Absolutely Polonus!
http://www.wginc1.com/cool_spot_2.gif

http://www.wginc1.com/xyxthumbs.gif

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Again I get a warm feeling that avast at least has saved the 100.000 that come here and we have a chance to educate to use safer practices,
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