Despite the masses of negative publicity heaped on the continent by the famed Nigerian spam industry, Africa is actually one of the world's safest places to go online in—featuring seven of the ten nations least attacked by malware.Really? My experience (admittedly primarily limited to the offices of Malawian government) is that you should treat any internet-capable computer south of the Sahara as a instant death.Virus-checker company AVG surveyed 127 million computers in 144 countries and calculated the average rate of attacks—with the African nation of Sierra Leone emerging as the least assaulted, with only one virus event logged per 692 web users.
Since internet and e-mail access on the continent tends to be a less reliable and more expensive, a lot of information transfer is done using memory sticks. Even if computers aren't subjected to very many attacks from the outside, it just takes one infected stick and a few marginally motivated employees to spread a virus to every other computer in the office. Many of these are the nasty, older viruses/trojans/worms which knock out the antivirus program's ability to function, which means that AVG can't see them.
This can happen astonishingly quickly. Tired of spending five minutes scanning my colleagues' USB drives every time I wanted to get an Excel table from them, I once tried to quarantine and clear every computer in my department, installing new (trial) antivirus on each cleared system. Unfortunately I missed a couple of computers, and within month when the trial software stopped working, the entire department had been reinfected.
It's possible that AVG's results are due to pretty extreme selection bias on two fronts:
- AVG users are probably a little more concerned and careful than those who don't bother to update (as most don't).
- As I mentioned before, many attacks can knock out AVG, which means no reporting.
- Many don't bother to update AVG's virus definitions, leaving the program incapable of detecting or reporting new viruses.
Hat tip to Chris Blattman's Google Reader shared items.
2 Comments
The only answer I can come up with for Sierra Leone's new title as Least Virus Assaulted Country is that there isn't enough government funding to get internet in most of the Ministry buildings.
Otherwise, my own observations would seem to be in line with your third point - many don't update their virus protection (or know how), and therefore can't detect new viruses. Though here in Sierra Leone it's usually not due to human error - I've tried to update all of our computers, but the internet connection is often too slow to make it in time before the power cuts out.
But hey, at least we came in first!
I'm actually using my personal laptop at work right now. Someone put their flashdisk in my office and it imported so many viruses and things that my work computer is being reformatted completely.