The average UK PC is rendered unusable for the equivalent of around nine working days every year because the owner is cleaning up spam or fighting viruses. This is two days a year more than the average UK worker takes off as sick leave, according to Yahoo.
A survey of 2,500 UK email users found that 70 percent of users had been infected by a virus in the past year and 42 percent say they found it less stressful fighting their way through rush-hour traffic than finding legitimate emails among the spam in their inboxes.
Spam is a problem for all email users but some companies are hit harder than others.
Vbug, a Microsoft developer support company based in the UK with just six employees, received around 720,000 emails messages in a month, 99.84 percent of which were spam.
Graham Parker, Vbug's chairman, said his employees had to spend more time each day finding the few legitimate emails among the mountain of spam.
"We have had our domain for the last seven years and considered changing our email addresses, but then you run the risk of losing contact with people you want to stay in touch with," Parker said.
The government has been waving the anti-spam flag for some time, but insists it cannot do anything about the problem alone.
Communications minister Stephen Timms said international collaboration is needed to win the war against spam.
"Nobody -- be it government, industry or otherwise -- can work alone to eliminate the problem overnight; if we are to have an impact on reducing it, the fight against spam demands international co-operation and collaborative campaigns," Timms said.
Some experts have claimed that the anti-spam laws brought in by the UK government last year have actually made the problem worse.
Talkback
Who opperates these computers? Do five simple things: 1. back everything up, 2. delete spam regularly, 3. use auto updates on Windows XP, 3. use a firewall, 4. always have a copy of windows to reinstall should your system crash. You shouldn't even need a paid for virus checker. I run 5 computers in my house, do all of these things and I have only once needed that reinstall disk in the last 5 years. Surely it is not the pc's but their inept users that need fixing.
The UK's network administrators inability to properly design, defend and maintain their network to effectively guard againd and filter out all malicious code [whether it be spyware, adware, virus' or blended threats] shouldn't be a headline nor a statistic. Get someone in there who's not afraid to lock the lusers down, limiting their access, configure their firewall and ids and that can proficiently perform the duties required of the position.
Don't waste our time enticing us to read posted articles about "LUSER ADMINS in the UK"That in itself would of been a better title for this article ! ! !]
From one of the above posts you should always have a copy of windows to reinstall?? Who wants to do that? Re-install to many times and your system gets messy.
How about doing this one simple thing - buy an Apple computer. Firewall comes activated out of the box. Apple's mail program features a good mail filter PLUS allows you to bounce mail back. Why is this good? Because it makes it look like your email address is bad.
Of course it is always a good idea to back everything up but how does this save you from the time it takes trying t get your system clean? That is the real problem. In my experience that is where my time used to be spent. Of course now I have a mac (Apple) and there are few to no known virus in the wild for Mac OSX.