We really need to a) Beat virus writers and spammers senseless and b) take people offline that don’t know how to keep their computer locked down (or buy them all Macs). There are some scary stats here:
- Spam exceeded 70% of all e-mail in July 2004 (60% of which is being sent by infected zombie machines)
- About 1 in 12 e-mails carried viruses in the first six months of 2004
- There are now 1,740 known, unpatched security flaws in Windows and other operating systems
- More than 1,974 unique phishing attacks were reported in July 2004
- In surveys, 74% of users whose PCs are running adware from Claria (formerly Gator) said they had no knowledge of it being installed.
The above article mentions a pile of ways to protect yourself (which are pretty common sense for most geeks), as well as backs up those claims with research.