Were you cooped up thanks to Storm Jonas this past week? You might have some computer woes to worry about, as well. Enigma Software has published a new survey that claims to show a spike in computer infections in areas affected by Storm Jonas.
The company says with more people online during the snow storm because they couldn’t go outside, malware infections have spiked. Through its SpyHunter anti-spyware program, the software company collects location data when someone’s computer runs a scan of its system. With this data, Enigma found that infections this month are a little higher than normal.
The software firm said it examined more than 225,000 infections this month in cities and states that were hit the hardest by the snow. It took the average number of daily malware infections for the days leading up to the storm and compared these figures with the infection rate for January 22 and 23 when Jonas was at its worst.
The data study claims to show vast jumps in computer infections over the last weekend’s storm. In some cities, like Boston, there were increases of more than 150 percent, while Washington D.C. saw jumps of 88.47 percent.
“So when it says that the Jonas spike for Washington, DC was 88.47 percent, that means that our software installed on computers in Washington, DC detected 88.47 percent more infections per day during the storm than during a typical day in January,” explained a spokesperson for the company.
At the same time, in a couple of other east coast states and cities, there was a drop in the number of infections detected by SpyHunter, such as Providence, RI and Charlottesville, VA.
Enigma Software believes the reason for the seemingly huge bounce in infections in most cities is due to the storm keeping people indoors, passing the time online, and clicking more links than usual.
The reasoning makes sense, but should be taken with a grain of salt, as well. Enigma declined to reveal any user numbers and its data study only examines scans carried out by its own software, so it can’t conclusively say that this January has become a far worse month for malware infections than usual.
