Romania ranks first in the world on the lifespan of malware bots on a computer, a recent report from IT security firm Symantec has found. On average, a malware bot 'lives' for 20 days in a computer, until eliminated.

The lifespan has however halved compared to last year, but is still the longest in the world. Worldwide, the average infection period is of 6 days. For comparison, it takes 13 days to find and clean a bot from a computer in the US, where the number of bot infections is however 100 times higher.

In Romania, 0.19 percent of all global bots were active in 2012, up from 0.16 percent the year before. This ratio is of 20 percent in the US. An Internet bot, also known as web robot, WWW robot or simply bot, is a software application that runs automated tasks over the Internet. Malware bots are typically used for illegal actions, and spread automatically, infecting other devices across networks.

editor@romania-insider.com