31% of EU Internet users were infected by worm or Trojan in 2010

Eurostat, the European Union's office of statistics, Monday said that 31% of all Internet users in the 27 EU member nations had contracted a computer virus that resulted in "loss of information or time" in the second quarter of 2010.

Eurostat found that 3% of all users suffered some kind of financial loss related to phishing/pharming attacks or fraudulent credit card use, and 4% of all users reported an abuse related to personal information and privacy.

On a country by country basis, Lativa (8%), The UK (7%), Malta and Austria (5%) were the worst areas for financial loss, and Bulgaria and Spain (7%) and Italy and the Netherlands (6%) were the worst areas for privacy violations.

This is an interesting fact because the Netherlands also scored the highest penetration for security software with 96% of users saying they used some sort of IT security or software tools to protect their data.

Overall, the presence of security tools is strong, with 84% of those in the survey reporting that they used at least some kind of protection for their PCs. Even countries that ranked the lowest still had around two-thirds of their population using security software: Estonia (65%), Romania (64%), and Latvia (62%).

Eurostat released these figures in advance of tomorrow's "Safer Internet Day," which has landed on the second day of the second week of the second month of the year for the last eight years, and is arranged by Insafe, a security network co-funded by the European Commission.

The EU nations that reported the lowest rate of infection by worm, trojan horse, or other computer virus were Austria (14%), Ireland (15%), Finland (20%) and Germany (22%), while the highest were Bulgaria (58%), Malta (50%), Slovakia (47%), Hungary (46%) and Italy (45%)