TAMPA, Fla. – Based on information released by Enigma Software, Forbes published an article last week listing the country’s “most hacked cities,” leading to rampant speculation as to what might be causing all the disruption in Tampa.
Could the “problem” be Florida’s older-than-average population? Are not-so-savvy seniors clicking away on phishing emails with reckless abandon? Or maybe people from the state often derisively referred to as “Flori-duh” really aren’t so bright, regardless of age?
As it turns out, the question is moot. Why consider such possibilities when you can just blame it on people surfing porn sites?
Even though Patrick Morganelli, the Senior vice president for technology at Enigma, told Forbes there was no single reason the cities identified in the study might experience a higher-than-usual rate of malware infection, Forbes needed something to fill all those column-inches – so let the porn-speculation begin!
Erika Morphy of Forbes conceded the idea porn sites are the cause of Tampa’s malware misery was not actually proffered by Morganelli or Enigma, but she has it on good (albeit entirely uncited) authority that “one of the most common ways computers attract malware is from infected adult websites.”
Actually, the often-cited high malware “infection rate” of porn sites has proved not so true upon closer inspection. In 2013, in fact, Symantec found only 2.4 percent of adult websites were infected with malware, a percentage markedly lower than the rate of religious websites.
Never mind Symantec and all their highfalutin’ “information,” though. There’s no end to personal stories and cautionary tales holding porn sites are chock-full of malware, and as we all know, the plural of the word anecdote is “dispositive data.”
Thus, even though the company that published the data doesn’t suggest porn sites as a possible vector of infection here, Morphy nonetheless felt compelled to further investigate the rumored connection between porn and malware. The only problem? The connection isn’t there to be found.
Drawing on Ben Edelman’s research into internet porn consumption rates by state, Morphy accurately noted two of the states on Edelman’s list, Florida and Utah, also have cities among Enigma’s 20 most-hacked – but that’s where the correlation falls apart.
Morphy concedes other than Salt Lake City, Tampa and Orlando, “there is little other crossover.” Even this concession is an understatement, however, because there is only one other crossover between Edelman’s top porn-consuming states and Enigma’s most-hacked cities: Little Rock, Ark.
So, if porn sites are causing all this so-called “hacking” (don’t even get me started on the chronic misuse of this term in modern journalism), then we need to explain why Mississippi, the state ranked second in Edelman’s porn-usage study, doesn’t have any cities appearing in Enigma’s top 20 most-hacked.
Are the residents of Mississippi simply that much more vigilant about keeping their anti-virus software up to date than their neighbors one state to the west? Maybe Mississippians still prefer porn on DVD? Or maybe even VHS. This is Mississippi we’re talking about here, after all….
At any rate, assuming Enigma’s data is accurate, Morphy was quite correct when she wrote “there are plenty of theories, none of which provide a real answer.”
Maybe so, but I think we have enough information to dispose of some theories, and I think the hypothesis porn sites are behind city-by-city malware stats is one we can safely drag into the recycling bin – until the next time there’s an online security issue which conceivably could be blamed on porn sites, that is.
