Anti-virus firm Enigma Software has released a list of cities to avoid if you don’t want your PC to catch malware.
Just kidding. There’s obviously no correlation between where you live and your risk of a computer infection. Still, some U.S. cities do appear to be far more malware-ridden than others in terms of infections per capita, according to Enigma’s analysis of more than 25 million infections across 150 cities.
Little Rock Arkansas, for instance, saw infection rates that were a whopping 14 times the national average. Tampa, Florida came in second with more than eight times the national infection rate, followed by St. Louis with nearly seven times the national average.
Unfortunately, Enigma is at a total loss for why some cities have higher infection rates than others. “I wish there was an easy way to determine what makes people in one area more susceptible to malware infections,” Patrick Morganelli, Enigma’s vice president of technology, said in a statement. “But there are so many different ways that infections can end up on computers that it’s tough to make any generalizations about why certain folks in certain cities seem to have more than others.”
Why this matters:
Don’t read into this list too much, as it’s entirely possible that any given city’s ranking is more random than anything else. Little Rock, after all, ranked 10th place in 2014, but jumped to first place last year. Still, if you know anyone in any of the following cities, feel free to dole out a bit of shame, and pray your hometown doesn’t land on the list next year.
