Home PC owners better have their anti-virus software up to date, for a new BBC News research has found that computers at home come under attack from hackers as much as 50 times a day.
As a part of the research, the BBC News website team set up a ‘honeypot’ PC – a computer that looks like a normal PC online, but one which has the ability to record everything that's done to it so that it can detect the dangers facing Internet users who log onto the Net from their homes.
The team found that every time the 'honeypot' was put online, it was attacked by hackers. According to the Daily Mail, on one particular night, the computer was attacked 53 times.
In one such attack, the computer suffered buffer overflow to weaken the web server built into Microsoft Windows. If the attempt had been successful, the hacker would have had control of the machine.
There were also two ‘port scans’ which is basically reconnaissance work by hackers and 11 attacks by 'Blaster' virus which would have rendered the machine unusable.
