CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Oct. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Do you know who's stealing your identity? Until just a few months ago, the odds were that it was someone in your family or neighborhood. Today, however, there is someone far more savvy and distant stealing your identity. There are currently 26.7 million Americans who are unwittingly transmitting their identity to international hackers and criminals.
In a recent study conducted by the Alladin Knowledge Systems of the top 2,000 known spyware threats, they found that 15 percent of spyware is actually stealing all the information typed on an infected computer, by logging the information the user types and then transmitting it to the spyware's creator. This method is called "key logging," and was the cause for five percent of the identity theft cases last year.
There are currently over 223 million Internet users in the United States (http://www.internetworldstats.com/america.htm). According to the National Cyber Security Alliance 80 to 90 percent of desktops are infected with spyware. At 80 percent, that's 187.4 million Internet users affected by spyware. With 15 percent of those transmitting the information needed for identity theft, that's 26.7 million people in the U.S. alone transmitting their identities to international hackers and criminals.
Last year, there were approximately 10 million cases of identity theft in the U.S., resulting in losses of over $50 billion, of which spyware comprised only 5 percent ($2.5 billion). The average identity theft case resulted in $5,000 in damage. If we do not do something to stop the flood of spyware, we could be looking at over $133 billion in losses this year due to spyware alone.
There are plenty of products available to fight spyware, many of which are free, or very inexpensive. To effectively fight spyware you must have an antivirus program, at least two anti-spyware applications, and a firewall on your computer. They must be properly installed, updated, and maintained. All of this gets to be a bit too much for the average computer user who just wants to use the computer and not have to spend hours each week updating and maintaining their computer, which is where PCImmunity(TM) comes in.
PCImmunity is the only product on the market that meets the security recommendations of computer experts. An Internet security suite alone will not fully protect you from spyware, as it only contains one anti-spyware application. To date, no one anti-spyware application has been able to detect and remove 100% of known spyware threats. The best applications available reach the upper 80 percentile.
Experts recommend using at least two anti-spyware applications, which results in coverage in the upper 90 percentile. PCImmunity is the only product available that not only allows, but enforces the two-anti-spyware-application policy.
Helping users with every aspect of PC security and maintenance is a feature unique to PCImmunity. It ensures the user has antivirus, anti-spyware, and firewall applications properly installed; if not, PCImmunity allows users to select which antivirus, anti-spyware, and firewall applications they would like from a list of high-quality, trusted applications, and then PCImmunity downloads, installs, and maintains them. PCImmunity ensures that computers get as virus-free and spyware-free as possible and stay that way. By conducting thorough virus and spyware scans daily, PCImmunity saves you hours each day. On top of security scans, PCImmunity also conducts disk maintenance, to ensure your computer is running at its best. PCImmunity takes all the learning and decision-making off the users' hands and does it all without charging an arm and a leg.