US lose billions to phishing

The new research was made to find out how much did US lose to phishing attacks in the past two years. A million American users lost more than $7 billion to viruses, spyware and phishing scams.

According to whatpc.co.uk, the survey shows that consumers face a one in four chance of succumbing to an online threat, a number that has slightly decreased since last year.

While making the research it appeared that a number of youngsters are at risk on social networks such as MySpace and Facebook. 13 per cent registered children were known to have an account on these two sites. They were all under 14, the minimum age the site officially allows. However, about 3 per cent kids were under 10. Of course there are many more, whose parents don’t even know the existence of their kids’ account at MySpace or Facebook.

More than 1.8 million households with internet access were infected with computer virus infection and had to replace their computers. 850,000 households had to replace computers due to spyware infections in the past six months. The consequence of viruses and spyware in past two years is $5 billion lost for US. That actually means that the rest $2 billion is recent damage.

The numbers are shocking, 33per cent of survey respondents did not use software to block or remove already existing spyware, and moreover, 3.7 million US households with broadband remain unprotected by firewall, according to whatpc.co.uk.

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