Top 5 ‘Zombie’-infested Canadian cities
Don’t panic, but depending on where you live in this fine country of ours, you might be living among zombies. Heck, you might even have one in your home.
No, this doesn’t have anything to do with the film Zombieland or the new Left 4 Dead 2 video game, but you might have zombies in your neighbourhood.
According to the computer security experts at McAfee, there are zombies in all the major Canadian cities (not just the politicians in Ottawa, badum bum).
A “zombie” is a PC infected with a virus (or Trojan horse) that allows hacker hijackers to take control of it. Your PC can then be turned into a “zombie” and used to generate spam or other malware attacks on other PCs, unbeknownst to you.
Nice, huh?
McAfee says the top five Canadian Cities with the highest zombie population are as follows:
1. Toronto
2. Montréal
3. Vancouver
4. Calgary
5. Winnipeg
This collected data is based on the number of infected IP addresses, your computer’s unique number that determines your geographic location.
To avoid turning your PC into a zombie, don’t click on any spam or any other suspicious emails you might receive, and of course, arm yourself with good antivirus and antispyware software.
If you’re reading this blog south of the border, the top five U.S. cities with the highest zombie population are:
1. New York City
2. Philadelphia
3. Austin
4. San Francisco
5. Dallas
Worldwide, the top four cities are Rio De Janeiro, Beijing, Istanbul and Moscow.
Hi Marc:
Adding to what you have already said and it being or should be common sense not to engage in inevitably what will infect one’s computer system. There are some useful tools within XP Pro and I assume Windows 7 that allow one to explore what is going on within the system, i.e. Task Manager weak in so many ways but one can glean some information from it, using commands such as msconfig, regedit and others. Plus with the myriad of really good and easy to use utility tools such as Norton System Works Pro you can keep a head of the game. One of the most important tools is setting a Set Point once a month and backing up before things go awry. Worst case scenario which is so only if your software is illegal, is to wipe the drive clean and start anew but first back up your data files and configuration files too.
Cheers.