• by Masha Geller , August 21, 2003

If you're an email marketer, this week was probably one for the books. The Worm/Sobig.F that's going around clogging up inboxes around the world has made just about every email user very "delete-happy."

This new bug aside, however, just what does the virus landscape looks like? According to a new survey commissioned by Edelman, which works with computer security companies, nearly one in three Internet users in the United States has been affected by a computer virus or hacker in the past two years. The independent survey, which questioned more than one thousand adults nationwide, also showed that Internet users feel far more secure at work than on their home computers.

According to the survey, which was conducted in mid-July, 32% of the respondents who use the Internet said they had been impacted by a hacker or computer virus in the past two years. Additionally, 43% of Americans said they felt less secure on their home computers versus 17% who felt they were less protected from viruses and hackers at work.

Additional survey results indicate that West Coast residents are most likely to feel insecure on their office computers, and the most wealthy and educated feel the most vulnerable on the Internet.

As a sidebar, the results of the survey were also helpful in determining who feels most vulnerable on the Internet: Typically, it appears to be a young male, in or recently graduated from college, somewhere in the Midwest.

"This survey gives us a clearer picture of what people are thinking about when it comes to computer security," said Jim Burke, senior vice president, Edelman Florida, which coordinated the survey. "It's also interesting to see that people are feeling more secure in their Internet activities at the office. Maybe this is a result of the many technological advancements in security products over the past few years."

On a side note, don't send anybody email with "thank you," "application" or "details" in the subject line because if your recipients are like me, they added those terms to their block list at the first sign of trouble.