Who's afraid of malware? Four in 10 have never had a virus

Despite an ever-increasing amount of malware in the wild, almost four in ten respondents to a silicon.com poll have never been hit by a virus.

The poll, which asked readers when their PC was last infected, found 39 per cent of respondents claim their machine has never fallen victim to a virus, while a further 41 per cent of people's PCs were last infected between one and five years ago.

The poll suggests that successful virus attacks could be becoming less common, or that anti-virus packages are stopping the malware before it has a chance to cause problems: only eight per cent of those who responded said they have been infected by a virus in the last year, a further eight per cent in the last six months with another five per cent reporting having been hit in the last month.

The news comes against a background of high-profile infections, with a number of public sector bodies being hit by the Conficker worm. Conficker has in the past infected several public sector computer networks, including computer systems at Westminster.

Malware, meanwhile, continues to grow. Recent research by security software firm Symantec shows that the number of new security threats rose from 624,267 in 2007 to 1,656,227 in 2008.

Malware may be on the rise, but it seems some now consider viruses only a minor danger to corporate security. Another recent poll by silicon.com found that 62 per cent of techies consider malicious or incompetent staff as the biggest threat to their organisation's IT security, ahead of viruses with nine per cent.