AOL, NCSA, my mom, and an upward trend
Rob Lemos wrote an article that appeared on Security Focus yesterday about the Online Safety Study results that came out recently. According to AOL and NCSA they're seeing drop in spyware or adware infected computers from 80% to 61% among the home users they surveyed. They also noted those with active virus infections fell from 19% to 12%. The survey was small, only 354 participants. But it's probably reasonable to say things seem to be getting better.
I conducted my own survey using one participant that I support, my Mom. My mother was a software engineer. Even though mainframe environments are very different from PCs, I still have total confidence that she understands most security concepts. She's been running XP SP2 since release candidate 1. She has the firewall on and anti-malware and anti-virus software installed. Somehow I still had to rebuild her machine 5 times in the last 18 months because of malware infections. She was (as best I can tell) clicking on things in her web-based email client.
Computer: Do you want to run this executable?
Mom: Sure.
Computer: How about this ActiveX control?
Mom: Yep.
Computer: I really don't think that's a good idea...
Mom: Sorry, I missed that. I was too busy clicking OK.
The good news is that in the last 6 months I've had to rebuid her machine zero times. So my informal survey results corroborate the results of the Online Safety Study. Things seem to be improving.
Strangely, the actual report doesn't say what operating system (or version or revision or patch level or anything that might actually be relevant) the participants are running. It seems like our surveys were performed with similar levels of rigor. It'd be interesting to see if more people are running XP SP2 (or more modern versions of other OSs) and if that contributed to the improvements. Or if, like my mom, they just learned to stop clicking on things.
I conducted my own survey using one participant that I support, my Mom. My mother was a software engineer. Even though mainframe environments are very different from PCs, I still have total confidence that she understands most security concepts. She's been running XP SP2 since release candidate 1. She has the firewall on and anti-malware and anti-virus software installed. Somehow I still had to rebuild her machine 5 times in the last 18 months because of malware infections. She was (as best I can tell) clicking on things in her web-based email client.
Computer: Do you want to run this executable?
Mom: Sure.
Computer: How about this ActiveX control?
Mom: Yep.
Computer: I really don't think that's a good idea...
Mom: Sorry, I missed that. I was too busy clicking OK.
The good news is that in the last 6 months I've had to rebuid her machine zero times. So my informal survey results corroborate the results of the Online Safety Study. Things seem to be improving.
Strangely, the actual report doesn't say what operating system (or version or revision or patch level or anything that might actually be relevant) the participants are running. It seems like our surveys were performed with similar levels of rigor. It'd be interesting to see if more people are running XP SP2 (or more modern versions of other OSs) and if that contributed to the improvements. Or if, like my mom, they just learned to stop clicking on things.
<< Home