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Tampa can claim a No. 1 ranking that won't come up in a chamber of commerce press release: Most malware infection rates among the 150 largest cities in the country.
Tampa beat out St. Louis, Orlando, Atlanta and Denver for the top spot, according to a new survey from Enigma Software Group. Tampa's infection rate, reports Enigma, was five times the national average in the first half of 2015. Tampa also topped the list in the last half of 2014.
Enigma Software studied more than 4 million different infections on computers from the top 150 cities to generate its report. Enigma Senior Vice President Patrick Morganelli, in a release, says it's hard to pinpoint precisely why one city has higher rates of bugs and infections that corrupt computers and systems. That's partly because there so many different ways infections get into a computer.
A common source of malware infections is from websites with infected content that entice users with pop-ups or downloads, the company says. And most Web pages that fit that description, Enigma adds, are adult websites where users are asked to download updates to their Web browser video players. But instead of an update, the user might unknowingly download an infection that installs automatically.
“We're not saying that people in Tampa, Orlando, and St. Louis are visiting more adult websites than people in other cities,” Morganelli says. “But that still is one of the biggest sources of the malware that our software detects.”
Here's a look at the worst cities when it comes to malware infections:
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