I just read an interesting statistic from this lockergnome article regarding Spyware.
Sophos reports that 50% of all Windows PCs connected to the Internet are infected within 12 minutes of them being wired to the Web. This applies to all Windows PCs that have no serious anti-virus protection and an active firewall.
According to the same company, 7,944 new viruses were released in the first half of 2005, with a nearly 60% increase over the previous year.
That is indeed pretty bad news by itself, but what I find absolutely stunning is the amount of people I know who have plenty of viruses, Spyware, and malware on their computers and they dont even know it.
The same survey in fact found 77 percent of users believing their home computers are either very safe (28 percent) or somewhat safe (49 percent) from online threats.
If you have not already visited my SOFTWARE/SUPPORT page and installed all the software I make available without having to go searching for it and to make sure you have the latest version which I usually try to stay on top of since it is used every day by hundreds of my existing clients, it is always interesting to learn that many are using it, but not daily, even though you use your computer for internet activity every day or, that it is being used every day but it is not getting "updated". By this I mean you are clicking on it to do a scan but have not checked to see if there were updates available. Basically a Spyware scanner works the same as an antivirus scanner. It takes a known definition file that tells it what to start looking for and then scans. Without the latest "definitions" how can it possibly find the bad things and since there are new viruses and Spyware released daily, how can you be sure? As well, when you do run the updates, quite often there will be a quick note upon completion that states "new version available".. This is quite often overlooked and even though you are going through the correct paces in scanning your computer, if the version you are using is out dated, even though it may go through the same scanning and checking for updates, it will not complete it since the newer version will obviously be reading a different set of "definitions", therefore it is always good to look at the "version" of the program you are using. Currently Ad-aware is up to version 1.06r whereas Spybot Search and Destroy just recently released version 1.4. You can always find the "version number" of software by clicking on the 'HELP' and choosing "about" as this will show you usually the software name/author and version number and quite often will include a link to the manufacturers website where you can confirm things. Note that you can also get there from a direct link at the SOFTWARE/SUPPORT page.
For more information please be sure to read the TIPS.
