Is there any real un biased research on how many hackers are really
hacking personal computers, and i dont mean corporate or business.

It seems like everybody must have a firewall theses days because its
projected that we need one.

The reason homeusers really need a firewall these days, is not so much
to protect from individuals attacking your computer, but to protect
from internet worms.

For example the recent Blaster worm is still very active on the
internet - any unprotected computer protected to the public internet
is likely to become infected within hours.

A worm will infect one computer and then immediately go to work to
infect other computers at random. If you are infected, your computer
becomes an attacker to infect other computers.

The risk from actual human attackers would be far lower. However with
worms so common on the internet, there is the very real potential that
one of these worms can infect your computer with a Trojan that will
allow remote hackers to gain full control of your computer and it's
files.

Regards,
Sycophant-ga

thankyou  for your coment about worms, I didnt really know that, thus
im going to post a new question shortly about worms


thanks