A study conducted by America Online and the National Cyber Security Alliance says that home networks and the computers on them are wide open to attacks.
Key findings include:
- 81% of computers lack core protections (recently updated anti-virus software, a properly configured firewall, spyware protection)
- 56% of computers lack current virus protection
- 44% of computers lack a properly configured firewall
- 38% of computers lack any spyware protection software (actually I would have thought this would be a lot higher)
There's also some interesting wireless networking specific information in the survey results. They found that 53% of the respondents who were using a wireless network had WEP encryption or WPA encryption turned on - this is much higher than I would have expected. Of course that still leaves 47% having no encryption at all on and leaving their wireless communications basically wide open to hackers.
Full results of the online security survey can be found here.
