It’s Your Fault

This article at NewScientist, Malicious software threatens internet economy, by Colin Barras & Tom Simonite, summarizes an OECD report: Malware: A security threat to the Internet economy (PDF). I’ve selected a few items from the summary:

• most malware infections (93%) occur on home users’ computers
• around one in four personal computers in the US – or 59 million – is already infected with malware
• a botnet — can now be rented for as little as as 33 cents per machine
• [criminals use t]hese [zombie] machines to send out roughly 80% of all spam
  and to attack commercial websites and other internet-linked systems with meaningless traffic as part of extortion schemes

Folks, it’s your fault (or about 25% of you, anyway) for not keeping your machines safe. Fix the damn things, or turn them off!

h/t: Mountains of Malware, Technocrat
image: Uncle Sam (pointing finger).jpg, Wikimedia Commons