This Throwback Thursday, we turn the clock back to February 2004 when, in order to get a gauge of the "real" virus problem, Jim Bates presented the findings of a survey of UK computer programmers.
"A ragbag of pseudo-scientific projections, surveys, reports, forecasts and speculations" — the true extent of the malware problem has always been difficult to gauge, whether because of organizations not wanting to reveal that
they have fallen victim to attacks or due to the marketing departments of vendor companies manipulating facts and figures for their own gains. In December 1993, Jim Bates declared that most of the information concerning virus
prevalence had either been unabashed hyperbole and exaggeration designed primarily to frighten users into buying
a particular anti-virus package, or simply gathered in such a way as to invalidate the statistics.
In an attempt to set the record straight, Jim wrote an article for VB, in which he presented the findings of a recent
survey of UK computer programmers — crucially, conducted without any input from the software vendors.
The survey covered, amongst other things, the types of viruses encountered, the identity of those viruses (the top nine were: Form, New Zealand II, Tequila, Cascade, Jerusalem, Michelangelo, Spanish Telecom, Dark Avenger and Yankee),
how the infections were dealt with, and how the threat of infection was dealt with. The biggest surprise to come from the report was the fact that fewer than 6% of the respondents actually reported the incident to the police.