Spam, phishing emails and fake anti-virus are three primary threats web users encounter while about 24% of users come across annoying offers to install fake antivirus software, according to a survey by conducted by Harris Interactive.
The survey revealed the link to these bogus programmes is contained in a pop-up, along with a fake warning about the PC being infected.
Around 31% users complained of numerous spam emails, which Harris Interactive said is hardly a surprise as Securelist figures show that 75% of the world’s email traffic in March 2012 was unsolicited correspondence.
About 23% of those surveyed reveieve Emails which purported to come from a bank or a site admin, and which sought logins, passwords and other personal data.
The survey polled 9,000 users from the US, Russia, the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, found these threats affected Russia-based users the most, of which 52% were likely to encounter irritating pop-up windows, 48% about fake notifications of infected PCs and 23% about unwanted web pages which open automatically.
The only online threat which was observed less often in Russia than in Europe or America are phishing messages.
About 27% of users received emails with suspicious attachments or links and similar messages in social networks and the problem is aggravated by the fact that, 18% of respondents struggle to differentiate between authentic emails and spam.
Most users feel confident when using Internet security software, but only 51% of consumers feel prepared for online threats, which widely affects those users who are regularly online and need modern protection tools for their PCs and mobile devices.
