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COPYRIGHT 2006 Consumers Union of the United States, Inc.
Attacks on the Internet spread like measles across an animated world map in a war-room-style chamber. The red dots advancing across the projected continents signified attempts at unauthorized entry into enterprise or home computers, probably to steal data or spread malicious software. That was the scene our reporter observed when he recently visited the Alexandria, Va., facility of security provider Symantec.
An accompanying tally certified the cyberassaults as a full-blown plague: More than 59 million such attempts had come from North America alone during the previous 24 hours of monitoring.
The 40,000 sensors worldwide monitored by Symantec's private security network represent but a tiny fraction of the Internet. Dozens of similar facilities, run by government, academic, and commercial institutions, monitor the daily onslaught of Internet threats.
Despite the best efforts of all those experts and institutions, the threat is as stark as ever. Nationally, the price of such cyberinsecurity remains staggeringly high. Thanks to viruses and spyware, American consumers spent at least $7.8 billion for computer repairs, parts, and replacement over the past two years, according to the 2006 Consumer Reports State of the Net, our third annual survey of online activity and threats, conducted this spring by the Consumer Reports National Research Center.
A recent rise in prosecutions of online perpetrators might offer hope that you're now less likely to suffer computer damage, financial loss, or both from viruses, spyware, or "phishing" e-mail scams. In fact, according to the survey, your odds of becoming a cybervictim are about 1 in 3, the same as a year ago. The survey results are summarized in the table on pages 22 and 23.
To help you cope with the Internet's hazards, we interviewed experts from industry, government, and public-interest groups. We spoke to national and state law-enforcement officials as well as victims of Internet threats. We collected hundreds of pieces of spam and created thousands of pieces of malicious software, the kind virus writers inflict on consumers.
We also looked at security software products that block viruses, spyware, and spam, and in each category, we found several dedicated products that offer very good or excellent protection against the respective hazard. Software suites, which try to protect against the same three hazards within a single package, weren't usually as successful.
Our survey and investigation found declines in virus and spyware infections since last year, but both remain epidemic. As we did last year, we found that some major, well-known companies have continued to support spyware or adware by using it as an advertising medium.
Until things improve, every online consumer must think like a security expert. "It's up to you to be sure all your software is up to date, with automatic scanning functions turned on," says Kathryn Sederquist of retailer Best Buy's Geek Squad technical support service in Riverhead, N.Y. She recently removed a virus that had replicated itself 40,000 times on a customer's home PC. For seven steps you can take to protect yourself online, see "Stay safe online," on page 25.
Here are some of the specific findings from our investigation:
* In a nationally representative sample of...
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