U.S. takes the prize for most infected PCs

[JMH]

Microsoft has released its semi-annual summary of security problems, solutions, insights, and recommendations known as the Security Intelligence Report, which is a distillation of the experiences from Microsoft's Malware Protection Center, Security Response Center, and Security Engineering Center. The report covers January through June of 2010, and it holds all sorts of surprises.

In the first quarter of 2010, out of 600 million different PCs scanned worldwide, Microsoft found infections on more than 11 million PCs in the United States. (The statistics-takers determine the country of origin by the settings in Windows Control Panel's Location applet.) By the second quarter, that number fell 12.8 percent to 9.6 million.

The United States had the highest number of infections of any country. Second was Brazil, third was China. That might be a surprising result, until you discover that Microsoft reported the United States, Brazil, and China as offending countries 1, 2, and 3 in the Security Intelligence Report for the last half of 2009 as well. There seems to me to be a bit of bias floating around.

Microsoft's infection statistics come from scans conducted by Microsoft Security Essentials, the closely related Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool, Microsoft Forefront Client Security, and a handful of lesser/obsolete products (Windows Defender and Live OneCare, to name two). Microsoft Security Essentials and MSRT are great tools, but they aren't infallible or universal. There's an inherent bias: PCs less likely to run Microsoft Security Essentials and/or MSRT (I won't mention Windows XP SP2 by name) will be under-represented in the results. That's a considerable bias because two-thirds of all Windows PCs still run Windows XP.

U.S. takes the prize for most infected PCs | Malware - InfoWorld

 

[DarkScorpion]

That's very obvious, we got like 75% of the worlds PCs

 

[Klaw117]

I think this is only because the USA has more Internet users than any other country. I'm surprised the PRC isn't in second place though. Maybe the Communists block access to infected sites.

 

[roban]

Yeah and the infections come from China.

 

[LiquidSnak]

Yay, I'm not contributing to the statistic!

 

[madtownidiot]

If you cut through the BS in the article (which was obviously slanted to fit the catchy headline instead of telling the story for what it is), you'll see that microsoft reports the US actually has a lower percentage of computers with infecions than most of the other countries mentioned in the article.

If you want to check out the report the article is based on you can find it here. A look at the infection trends from the microsoft report should be enough to expose the article for the sham it is. I also found the distribution of malware hosts somewhat interesting. Another good statistic, windows 7 computers consistetly had the lowest infection rates

 

[Dave76]

INTERNET USAGE STATISTICS
The Internet Big Picture
World Internet Users and Population Stats









77% of the North American population use the Internet, which is 13.5% of the Internet users world population.


The largest percentage of the total Internet users by continent is Asia at 42%.

 

[Zidane24]

I say this on behalf of my entire country of how honored we are to receive such a prestigious award

We also swear to uphold and maintain this honor for many years to come

 

[Layback Bear]

It's not hard for me to believe there are that many infected computers. Many people didn't get the memo that security is necessary not just another program. Trying to tell some folks around here that some websites are not safe is like talking to a pet rock. At my local watering hole just chatting a bit I raised the issue of cell phone security. More pet rocks gathered together having a beverage. They don't care and don't want to know.

 

[madtownidiot]

the actual figure is about 1/2 of 1% of all computers in the US whose users have run MSE, defender or the malicious software removal tool are infected.. So it's not as big of an issue as the article makes it out to be