The traditional anti-virus scan seems to be close to extinction, with barely one in ten PC users bothering to run them regularly, or at all, according to the latest analysis from security firm OPSWAT.
Using figures taken from the firm’s
Gears monitoring tool (which is heavily weighted towards US consumer and SME users), 91.7 percent of Windows PCs had not completed a system scan within the previous week.
Of these, 15.1 percent hadn’t even had their anti-virus definitions updated with the previous three days which might explain why 3.3 percent were found to be infected with some form of ‘potentially unwanted application’. Just under one percent were affected by the most serious ‘persistent’ threats.
