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Symantec: Religious Sites "Riskier Than Porn For Viruses"
First time accepted submitter kongshem writes "According to Symantec's annual Internet Security Threat Report, religious and ideological websites have far more security threats per infected site than adult/pornographic sites. Why is that? Symantec's theory: 'We hypothesize that this is because pornographic Web site owners already make money from the Internet and, as a result, have a vested interested in keeping their sites malware-free — it's not good for repeat business,'"
But jebus will protect me so I don't need your silly anti-virus
@Random_Adam
Sometimes a sig doesn't have to be funny!!
So how are they categorizing pornographic websites? What are the other 9 categories that are more "dangerous"?
It is interesting to note that Web sites hosting adult/pornographic content are not in the top five, but ranked tenth. The full list can be seen in figure 16. Moreover, religious and ideological sites were found to have triple the average number of threats per infected site than adult/pornographic sites. We hypothesize that this is because pornographic website owners already make money from the internet and, as a result, have a vested interest in keeping their sites malware-free – it’s not good for repeat business.
Figure 16, interestingly, does not show religious and ideological sites, I assume it is grouped with "Education/Reference". The full top 10 is
Children are sexually transmitted so there's a flaw in your logic there.
I don't agree. Agnosticism is just weak atheism, and only relevant if you ascribe special importance to some religions and their gods. Otherwise, what's the point of being agnostic about EVERYTHING you can't know whether it exists or not? It's nonsense. "Oh, I'm an agnostic about the invisible pink unicorn (blessed be her holy hooves), and about Kropal the mighty God of Making Holes in Socks, and about Thor and about Klaatu and about Mohammed and about Jesus and about Cats being the avatars of our master race and about ...".
Anyone who can seriously invent a god and then say that the only scientific viewpoint is to be agnostic about it (because you know, who knows, right?), is just hiding behind their mother's skirts.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
It is not even that. Atheism and Agnosticism exist on orthogonal axes. Theism and Atheism make ontological statements about the existence resp. nonexistence of deities. Agnosticism, on the other hand, makes an epistemological statement about the possibility to know about said existence. It is perfectly possible to be an agnostic theist as well as an agnostic atheist.
As for the scientific validity - in absence of evidence, the default assumption is non-existence. It is simple as that. Do we need that debate every single fucking time the weekly religion vs. atheism thread pops up?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
The Symantec report, the Internet Security Threat Report, 2011 Trends, did not say what the article in the OP claims.
The actual report is here: http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/other_resources/b-istr_main_report_2011_21239364.en-us.pdf . Page 33 of the report, the only discussion of religion, states
"religious and ideological sites were found to have triple the average number of threats per infected site than
adult/pornographic sites."
Three points:
1. The report lumps religious and ideological sites together. Maybe the infected sites were ideological (non-religious) sites. You cannot conclude anything about religious sites at all from that statistic.
2. The report implies nothing about the safety of religious/ideological sites. It just says that if a religious/ideological site is infected, then it has more threats on average than an infected adult site. If the percentage of religious/ideological sites that are infected is lower than the percentage of adult sites that are infected, then religious/ideological sites could be much safer on average. Indeed, figure 16 on page 36 of the report doesn't list religous/ideological sites as dangerous. The point is that the safety of religious/ideological sites as a whole must account for uninfected sites. The "number of threats per infected site" is just about irrelevant.
3. If there is any limit to the gullibility or statistical illiteracy of internet users, I have yet to perceive it.