That’s because you have selective memory gaps. Even Greg Kroah-Hartman says Linux users need to run anti-virus software.

-Possibly, Robert, but the probability of encountering “a malware,” as you put it, is 1.0 on the Internet.-

I would say the number is not 1.0 but around 0.9 to 0.99. I have that odd machine that in it life time never gets infected and never hit a bit of malware on the Internet. This person friends are virus clean. They use email and stick to a limited number of sites and don’t end up on spam mailing list. So remain clean.

Yes to most people it would appear 1.0. Now pirating software your machine is basically 100 percent for getting infected sooner or latter.

Yes you could say the ones that don’t get infected are the lucky ones.

No, you’re confusing “susceptibility” with “encountering.”

These are your terms: not mine, nor anybody else’s.

The probability of “encountering” is, indeed, as close to 1.0 as makes no difference. Luckily, Oldman seems to be unique amongst Windows users in that he is in possession of both Magic Pixie Dust and the Blessing Of God, and consequently he can ignore that pesky 1.0 multiplier.

Lucky man!

It’s high but not that high or oldman’s PC would have fallen over long ago. Theoretically, one could stick to a single site with text-only on a read-only site and be pretty safe, not that many do that… There are ~100million websites out there and a moderate percentage are spreading malware. It is quite possible to have a lot of fun while missing the bad sites. The port-attacks are usually stopped by any modern fire-wall. Even at the schools where I worked and that other OS was riddled with malware there were some machines not being infected even though they had the identical hard drive image. I think the biggest factor is the energy of the user to visit more sites. If you only visit a short list of reliable sites, you are fairly safe. I think most people are in that category but people who really use IT to find random information all day long are much more likely to encounter malware. e-mail used to be a major vector but many people use cloud services using very sophisticated techniques so I think the probability of encountering malware at any PC behind a good firewall is likely about 25%, if I had to guess. There are millions of malwares and ~100 million web sites. It takes some effort to plant a malware so there is a good chance many sites have not been infected.

Possibly, Robert, but the probability of encountering “a malware,” as you put it, is 1.0 on the Internet.

I’ll leave you to work out what effect this has on the probability of being susceptible.