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Rich Countries Suffer Less Malware, Says Microsoft Study
chicksdaddy writes "To paraphrase a quote attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald: 'Rich countries aren't like everyone else. They have less malware.' That's the conclusion of a special Security Intelligence Report from Microsoft, anyway. The special supplement, released on Wednesday, investigated the links between rates of computer infections and a range of national characteristics including the relative wealth of a nation, observance of the rule of law and the rate of software piracy. The conclusion: cyber security (by Microsoft's definition: low rates of malware infection) correlated positively with many characteristics of wealthy nations – high Gross Income Per Capita, higher broadband penetration and investment in R&D and high rates of literacy. It correlated negatively with characteristics common in poorer nations – like demographic instability, political instability and lower levels of education.'"
Better literacy leads to a better ability to spot the poorly written bogus come-ons that get you infected when you click on them? I just can't believe it.
tl;dr but malware level can only be one metric and is an incomplete definition of security.
You would expect to find people suffering damaging attacks to their livelihood and important data to be found at a computer with high "security".
But I bet suffering spam and phishing target rich people which should screw up their metric.
That, and dividing the world into territories when it should probably be divided into something else like government, military, private computers, mobile, multinationals, kids, etc.
Using older software (older versions of windows that is) and not having access to a "computer guy" in your family, combined with not being able to just "buy a new computer because the old one is broken" or even using official support would lead to simply not being able to deal with malware.
People tend to pirate Windows XP because it is much easier than Windows Vista/7/8 and they probably are running DELL P4 machines thrown to the curb by reasonable people
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
That may well be but why is it that EVERY piece of spam I receive is advertising an american product from an american company and EVERY piece of malware I see in my daily job is either ultimately traced to some american kid or a russian punk?
I haven't seen nigeria spam in years.
Computers at internet cafes in third-world countries look as scary and diseased as truck stop hookers. One imagines that whoever set up the computers way back when might have been tech savvy, but the owner paid him for his one-time services, then for the next 5-10 years kept the machines running with no updates or virus scans. The staff hired to work there are just babysitting the machines to make sure no one steals them; they have no greater knowledge of how to fix a problem than restarting the computer.
I use these establishments only to plug my notebook into a ethernet jack, but a non-insignificant amount of times, to ask to use your own computer instead of their infectious, malware-ridden machines evokes suspicion that are you are some kind of hacker terrorist and they want you to leave.
I didn't RTFA. Which countries are the rich ones, and which ones are the poor ones?
Also, once we get the rich and poor sorted out, can we then ask another, valid question? Which of these countries is producing the most software/hardware?
just my .02
Now that's a mighty find report.
Care to compare that rate VS Open Source ?
Because my memory says Microsoft cuts off machines that are pirated so if you are unwilling to spend a month of ones cashflow for software just so you can get patches OR one can choose to eat, pay rent or property taxes, or electricity.
This problem lies at the foot of Microsoft and their usary. Unless they can show that it doesn't by comparing Open Source boxes based on things like FreeBSD or any of the various GNU/Linux forkes suffer the same problem, the only logical choice is this report is a failed astroturffing attempt to blame others VS Microsoft policies.
But how can anything that Microsoft says about malware be trusted when Microsoft's own Security Essentials software has problems detecting malware?
In poor countries the salaries are so low that people can not afford all the software they want. When you make 6000 US$ a year and only one of the application you need costs 2000 US$ , you resort to piracy. There are many cracked applications available in the WEB and most of them insert backdoor traps, trojans and worms.
The reason is because anti-virus software on these computers is not updated. Reasons for not updating primarily revolve around how expensive it is to connect to the Internet. I don't live in my home country, Zimbabwe. When I did visit the one time I installed Ubuntu on the home PC because half the time the PC was unusable thanks to malware. I blogged about it here http://www.mahalasoft.co.za/blog/ubuntu-linux-experiment . The next time I visited, Windows XP had be reinstalled on the machine because that is what most of the "technies" knew back home, yes the PC was unusable again.
Rich countries have better education, news at 10.
-Noc
correlated positively with many characteristics of wealthy nations – . . . higher broadband penetration
More Macs? LOL
It's in the title.
To make sure you're rich.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
It's more likely if you're in a better off country, you're using your own computer. Therefore it's in your own self interest to keep malware off of it. Just like people are more likely to take care of anything else they own.
Besides, who really gives a shit about what happens to a library or netcafe computer? (Provided you know enough not to do your banking or anything of that sort on them.) Eventually when it comes to the lowest common denominator in a public resource and lack of software maintenance, the tragedy of the commons cesspool is likely the expected result.
Most people here in Sweden depends on the internet to do stuff like paying bills, communicate with government agencies, school and what not. Virus infested PCs are often useless for that.
Countries didn't become rich by accident.
It's a combination of several things, starting with higher IQs and then including things like rule of law, hygiene, political stability and emphasis on learning.
In any part of the world, and in every ethnic group, you will find that some countries have broken away from the others and have generally higher intelligence, thus put a priority on things like stability, rule of law, infrastructure, etc.
It's not an accident they're richer.
In life, all things come down to the choices we make and the abilities we have. It's not arbitrary, no matter how much ./ peanut gallery would like to think it so.
That, and dividing the world into territories when it should probably be divided into something else like government, military, private computers, mobile, multinationals, kids, etc.
I'm intrigued, how exactly does one go about dividing the world into mobile?
When the dodgy $1 Windows+Office disk comes complete with Malware this is really no surprise. I'm sure the $1 Norton disk also comes with free anti-virus+rootkit.
Jason.
There are many reasons why malware is so rampant in poor countries.
1. If majority of population cannot afford buying software legally, even those who can afford do not buy it, because they see no reason to pay relatively huge money for something that almost everyone gets for free. Piracy creates increases the risk not only because some pirated software may include malware, but automatic update is often disabled to prevent the pirated version being detected by the vendor.
2. Old computers often mean that they cannot run new software, which means a lot of software in use is no longer supported by the vendor, and there is no security updates for it (even if it was bought legally).
3. Sharing a PC among many people is very common. This dramatically increases a chance of some virus being introduced, because it feels like no one responsible. If something bad happened, anyone can claim it is someone else's fault. Thus anyone feels free to do whatever damn thing comes to his or her mind.
4. There is no police to fight cyber crime, so cyber criminals can do whatever they want with virtual immunity. In fact, common attitude is to blame victims (they should not have installed some pirated software, they should not have visited such sites, etc).
5. Most people do not use their computer to store or transmit any private sensible information (such as credit card numbers), so as long as malware does not interfere with their work, they are reluctant to take any action to remove it. Usually they do not have any antivirus software except perhaps a demo, which can only scan but does not remove malware. So they have to pay some money a local "guru" to clean up their computer, but only to find the computer infected again in less than a week later (probably, due to some unpatched software, infected an USB stick, or some other reason).
6. Very low computer literacy means that people have less understanding about how computers work and how to use them safely. So they may download and install programs that make some completely unrealistic promises (such as making your computer or Internet connection twice faster). In general, they have no clue about the source from which they download software.
the linux malware numbers are probably minimal
This explains why they are always trying to move money out of these countries, the banks are riddled with malware over there.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
The "paraphrase" in the summary is so loose, I'm not sure it qualifies. What Fitzgerald actually wrote was
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.
This comes from the third paragraph of the short story "The Rich Boy", which you can read online here:
The Rich Boy.
Actually, its more likely that health of your computer is a luxury. When you are worrying about the health of your kids, who cares about the health of the computer. Its all about priorities here. It has nothing to do with "observance of the law". ffs...
Look at the spam and malware on your system (if any of the latter). Then do a whois on the IP that the spam and phishing comes from, the original received that has a real IP or domain name. Where do they want your money to *go*?
mark "Nevada? Utah? California? Pennsylvania?"
Wow, Microsoft. Really?
So you're saying that we can solve all of our problems with malware by simply.... becoming richer?
We never thought about that. Thanks for informing us! We'll get right on that immediately!
Cancer rates by country (Age-Standardised Rate per 100,000)
Highest
1 Denmark 326.1
2 Ireland 317.0
3 Australia 314.1
4 New Zealand 309.2
5 Belgium 306.8
6 France (metropolitan) 300.4
7 United States of America 300.2
8 Norway 299.1
9 Canada 296.6
10 Czech Republic 295.0
11 Israel 288.3
12 The Netherlands 286.8
Lowest
50 South African Republic 202.0
49 Albania 202.8
48 Montenegro 204.3
47 Romania 205.1
46 Argentina 206.2
45 Armenia 207.5
44 Barbados 207.9
43 Malta 211.4
42 Belarus 213.1
41 New Caledonia 218.5
40 Serbia 218.9
(yes, this is totally unrelated, and off topic; ceded.)
Need Mercedes parts ?
I have worked in ICT ops & triage in the richest countries and the poorest. Without doubt the higher malware rate is a function of a lower standard of systems configuration and maintenance. It has nothing to do with the capital cost of the systems and everything to do with the availibility / cost of skilled administration. This scarcity means that functionally, the herd immunity threshold for malware in the localised information ecology is rarely crossed. As in epidemiology generally, different localised conditions favour different transmission profiles. So for example in less developed locations USB memory sticks are the most common infection vector, as telecoms are less accessible. The prevalance viruses and malware in LDCs is akin to the global Windows server ecology in the late 1990s, or home PCs of the late 1980s. In these two historical examples different vectors flourished as a function of the immaturity of configurations and configurers with respect to the threat.
Dialectician. Archology.
IMHO, much of the correlation with broadband and wealth may have to do with the security model of Microsoft: A multi-billion dollar industry building add-on malware protection that works largely by comparing incoming traffic to an ever-growing list of malware "signatures".
To use one of these protection-and-cleanup services you need to do two things:
- Pay a fee periodically. (The poor need not apply.)
- Download an ENORMOUS table of new signatures from time to time. (Those without broadband need not apply.)
At a site with "slow DSL" I have a laptop with a windows install that I use when I must use certain windows tools. I recently left it off for about two months before I needed it again. Just downloading the new signatures, at about a half megabyte per second, took several hours. Adding in software updates meant it was a couple days before it was ready to go again.
The machine would have been totally unusable if only dialup were available, unless I only loaded updates rarely or selectively and disabled (or never installed) the anti-malware product. That would mean a user would have to take his chances with malware and depend on the malware people to keep themselves in business by not totally trashing the victims' machines.
Or loading a Linux (or other open-source Unix-family) distribution. B-)
I wonder what the numbers would be like if only the FOSS users' machines were examined?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Pretty sure all that manages to say is that it costs money to maintain security.
Leave it Microsoft to miss the obvious.
Now we can test that model for prediction. EU brain dead leaders decided to cure the public debt crisis by austerity (instead of printing the money that is too expensive to borrow, raising taxes for the wealthier, or whatever alternative you prefer). This is killing the whole continent economy, drowning entire countries into poverty. Will we see a malware surge in Greece, Portugal, Spain?