On 21 March 2010 23:10, <John.Herbert@usc-bt.com> wrote:

Hey James,m

Well, I'm sure that the 140,000,000 is a FUD figure extrapolated by an AV vendor rather than an actual audit (:-), but you make a fair point.

That said, I did start wondering how an "Internet User" is defined in the stats you pointed to. Assuming that Internet User means an Internet connection (?), do we assume that there is only one bot per computer (bearing in mind that if you're susceptible to one, there's a good chance you have succumbed to more than one); or that there's only one computer per user (progressively less common in a domestic setting, and see the previous point again also); and we are probably ignoring the possibility of bots in commercial environments (bots couldn' t possibly penetrate the workplace, right?). All of the above I'd wager could skew the statistics to something more reasonable.

In conclusion: blah blah blah statistics. Can't win :)

Have a good weekend :)

j.

Yes and what about virtual machines, servers, data centers? There are going to be (obviously) far more machines online than there are people so I guess the figure can be greatly skewed but I can see from other peoples posts that it could also be accurate. Scary! -- Regards, James ;)