Mightn't this also be a result of tech-savvy folk going home for the holidays? I know that when I went to visit my family, I ended up installing ant-virus and anti-adware/spyware software on at least three machines because family members were complaining that they were all "too slow."

good point

@ EagleEyez

I was about to say the same thing, as I had to play tech support for my family, including finally getting them set up with high speed Internet access.

Couldn't this also be do to the earthquake that shut down most of Asia's Internet access due to the 6 undersea cables needing repair?

I wonder what the effects of Vista will be on the number of infected computers in the coming months.... Maybe, hopefully we'll see a drop because of Microsofts new OS.

I Call BS on this one, I just spent the last 4 hours eliminating trojan viruses on my parent's computer. Then never listen to me, I tell them to Run Ad-Aware and Spybot Search and Destroy on a weekly basis and they haven't run it once since I installed it 9 months ago. Christmas Eve the Viruses took over, they were one massive pain to kill, several had to be killed repeatedly, found almost 100 trojan viruses on their computer.

Yeah, I'd definitely say some of it is from the technically inclined members of the family returning home for the holidays. I cleaned up my parents' computer, and it had just over 1100 pieces of spyware/adware. Like Plasmafire, I also installed Ad-Aware and Sb S&D a long time ago, and they hadn't been ran or updated once. While cleaning out their e-mail I found several attachments with names like "funny_picture.exe" Unfortunately they feel the need to read, open the attachment of, and then forward on every forward they get. When I got there their computer was not useable at all. There were porno adds within 30 seconds of booting the computer, and opening IE caused about 10 different pop-ups. Maybe one day they'll learn.

It is a hope of mine that the increase in users correlates with the increase in knowledge about security of their computers. This may not be happening now but maybe sometime in the future.

Good call EagleEyez. I do the same thing for my family members computers when I see them over the holidays.

Then again, these same statistics probably spiked just after this article posted...

I dunno, my spam has dropped considerably from 1200+ a day to just over 800. When the weekend hits, it's normally around 1000 or so.

If anything, SP2 helps by making it possible to get updates without getting pwned before Windows Update actually loads...

Ah, the spyware will be back, so it's a nice lull...