Urban Schrott, my colleague at ESET Ireland, has been sharing some interesting statistical information in recent months from surveys conducted on the company's behalf in Ireland, covering such issues as infection patterns, attitudes to security and safe computing, and password usage, and much of that information has found its way into our monthly Threatsense Reports (available from the ESET Threat Center under the heading "Threat Updates".
While it's not safe to draw too many global conclusions from regional statistics, the Republic of Ireland is rather an interesting case, since it combines a fairly small population relative to the size of the island with an economy that could be described as having gone from a largely agrarian economy to one that has enjoyed significant investment in information technologies and industries with comparatively industrialization in between, leading to some interesting demographic variations.
Today's IRISSCERT conference in Dublin has drawn attention to its own statistics based on the incidents reported to it since January 2011: you can read Urban's take on that in his article Cyber criminals behind 96% of attacks on Irish websites. And the November ThreatSense report (currently being put together) includes an article by Urban with a fascinating sidelight on social media and broken relationships. I'll post a link to the report here when it's available.
David Harley CITP FBCS CISSP
ESET Senior Research Fellow
