Panda Software has created a site “Infected or Not” which allows you to quickly scan your PC for well-known virus and spyware infections, and also shows an interesting set of statistics of the people who used their software.

According to their counter, currently 15% of the PCs that run their software have some soft of virus or spyware embedded on their machine, with another 20% not running any antivirus software at all.  Without knowing the real numbers, it’s hard to extrapolate this statistic.  One would think that people who had suspicions that their machine was infected would visit the site, so the number may skew a little high, but even then it’s a frightening number.  From their statistics page, 3.78% of PCs that run their software have a Trojan installed on them.  That paints a very bleak picture of how many machines out there could be used as spamming tools.  (Traditionally, compromised home PCs are used by spammers to send out their spam en masse.)

Their software doesn’t work for the Mac, but then Heluna is currently unaware of any active Trojan or spyware installations on the Mac platform.  Did this tool find any virus or spyware infections on your machine?

The latest Consumer Reports survey states that US Consumers have lost more than $7 billion in the past two years due to viruses, spyware, and phishing e-mails.

From Consumer Reports:

Based on survey projections, computer virus infections prompted an estimated 1.8 million households to replace their computers in the past two years and 850,000 households to replace computers due to spyware infections in the past six months. Additionally, 33 percent of survey respondents did not use software to block or remove spyware. And CR projects that 3.7 million US households with broadband remain unprotected by a firewall.

If one were to assume that only 10% of those 1.8 million compromised machines were turned into spam-sending zombies, that would be 180,000 new sources of spam in the past two years.  Keep in mind that these were the households that actually decided to spend their hard-earned money to replace an otherwise good machine.  Imagine the number of families that have a compromised machine that may “run a little slow from time to time” but they keep around because they’re unwilling or unable to clean the machine or purchase a new one.  The potential for spam-sending zombies sitting inside the average household is enormous.

As for the impact of spam itself upon these families:

Consumer Reports’ survey respondents have reported a lower proportion of spam reaching their Inbox than in the past, which CR believes is a result of better spam-blocking. Survey results indicate that about 650,000 consumers ordered a product or service advertised through spam in the month before the survey. Additionally, in 5 percent of the households surveyed that had children under 18, a child had inadvertently seen pornographic material as a result of spam.

Whenever we at Heluna read these types of results, we’re always astonished at the amount of money actually spent upon products advertised by spam.  The one easiest way to slow the flood of spam is to stop purchasing items advertised in  spam messages.

You have no doubt browsed our new site, which we’re very proud of.  The new version of the site allows for much quicker rollout of the new features that we’ve been coming up with.  Clients will notice that their quarantine is much faster, and easier to manage now, while regular browsers will notice how much faster the statistics are generated.

The Heluna blog is a place for more general discussion about spam, the Internet, and other various technical items, but for now we just wanted to point out the site relaunch, and thank our clients for all of their support.  If you have any ideas for topics, please feel free to leave comments either here or in e-mail.