10 Oct 2002 10:41
At least 80 percent of China's computers have been infected with viruses, the official China Daily newspaper reports, highlighting the vulnerability of one of the world's biggest PC and Internet markets.
Thursday's findings were the result of a six-week survey conducted by the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Centre, the newspaper said.
"Only 16 percent of computer users we sampled this year reported they were free from any virus attack, while last year nearly one in three users said they suffered no computer infections," the newspaper quoted the centre's chief engineer, Zhang Jian, as saying.
Half of the infected machines had suffered data losses, problems browsing the Web, or other damage, the newspaper said.
However, the recent Bugbear worm appeared not to have affected many systems in China, the newspaper said.
Only a small percentage of Chinese have access to computers and the Internet, but with a population of nearly 1.3 billion, the absolute numbers are still huge.
China added 12 million new Internet users in the first six months of this year, pushing its total to more than 45 million, official data shows.
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