Some of the Most Malware Ridden Cities in US

Anti-virus firm Enigma Software has released a list of cities to avoid if you don’t want your PC to catch malware.

Just kidding. There’s obviously no correlation between where you live and your risk of a computer infection. Still, some U.S. cities do appear to be far more malware-ridden than others in terms of infections per capita, according to Enigma’s analysis of more than 25 million infections across 150 cities.

Little Rock Arkansas, for instance, saw infection rates that were a whopping 14 times the national average. Tampa, Florida came in second with more than eight times the national infection rate, followed by St. Louis with nearly seven times the national average.

Unfortunately, Enigma is at a total loss for why some cities have higher infection rates than others. “I wish there was an easy way to determine what makes people in one area more susceptible to malware infections,” Patrick Morganelli, Enigma’s vice president of technology, said in a statement. “But there are so many different ways that infections can end up on computers that it’s tough to make any generalizations about why certain folks in certain cities seem to have more than others.”

Why this matters: Don’t read into this list too much, as it’s entirely possible that any given city’s ranking is more random than anything else. Little Rock, after all, ranked 10th place in 2014, but jumped to first place last year. Still, if you know anyone in any of the following cities, feel free to dole out a bit of shame, and pray your hometown doesn’t land on the list next year.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3022...he-most-malware-ridden-cities-in-america.html

 

I bet all the tea in China the reason why Little Rock: 1,412% above national average For one, many users there are on social media sites and the older folks are prone to click on bad links on these sites..A lot of your older users have outdated software (Java / Adobe Reader / Adobe Flash)'that invites Aware Helper.

As for Tampa and the other cities with mainly younger folks ...It has to do with torrent sites (BitTorrent) downloading pirated material. The site below, you can actually see Live attacks that is very interesting but this is such a small percentage of what really goes on. Visit:

http://map.norsecorp.com/

 

Yeah I would bet you are right when you balance mistakes older users always make and then the younger ones with torrent downloading it really adds up.

 

By the way, here's another good one to see live attacks @
http://www.securitywizardry.com/radar.htm

You actually actually learn a lot from the site as well.

 

Wow interesting site thanks for that!

 

Good stuff, and that is all compounded when you have an improperly configured operating system for security Last week and helped a lady at work by cleaning out some extremely nasty stuff her son got on the Family PC by not having a separate and limited account (and locked down by black lists and a locked down browser). So it was porn sites and downloaded porn, and also script kiddie hack sites he has been visiting and he downloaded some tools. In the end I reformatted it after saving the valuable stuff like her Family photos and emails and then used Macruim to set some images. Set up a very limited account for her son. Had a lengthy talk about monitoring her son. Disabled the true admin account. Set up the router to record all outgoing pages and IP's. Set up a recording feature on the netstat command for connections to the PC and showed her how to get through that and keep logs of everything. Also no sharing her own password (never wtite it down as well) and if an attempt to get on her password is even tried, that is also monitored.

 

A good friend of mine from anand has a really nice guide on the basics of securing and locking down an operating system. I do pretty much the same type things. Though an older guide the basic principals are the same.

http://www.mechbgon.com/build/security2.html

How a non admin account helps
http://www.mechbgon.com/build/Limited.html

 

WOW.... Very helpful site! Keeper for sure

 

The non admin account approach is how I handle the consistent offender and I could not agree more change password, don't write it down and do not share it.
Another approach I take is a sincere conversation with parent and child something to the effect of you can pay for your music or "download it free and pay me $200 every 3 months to wipe and load" your Windows, the choice is yours".
Personally I do not see where Secure Boot provides any protection and I have run enough tests to prove that and the UEFI bios is a thorn in my ass rather than a help
for any issues. But that is my opinion!