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"The first half of the year we did a study of 450,000 PC Tools Threat Fire community members, and we analyzed the number of attacks that hit those computers over the course of the first six months," explained Michael Greene of PC Tools. "And what we found was New York City was facing the most number of attacks based on that community of our users. The kinds of attacks we're seeing are spyware, adware, viruses, and keyloggers."

New York is followed by Houston, Texas; Los Angeles, California; Chicago, Illinois; and Miami, Florida. This study is based per user, not based the overall number of attacks on a particular city.

One population that's most likely to fall victim to attacks, regardless of location, is online rookies. As a result, PC Tools donated 8,000 software security packages to Per Scholas, a non-profit organization that puts computers into the hands of low-income families.

"The number one issue we face on the service side is a virus on the system," said Plinio Ayala of Per Scholas. "The people we serve are first-time users and so they're so excited about getting a system and getting on the Internet that they begin to surf all over the place, and so they might encounter sites they shouldn't be at and they might download software they shouldn't."

Although the top-attacked cities are large, analysts say that size is not really a factor.

"Interestingly enough, Houston is smaller than L.A. or Chicago, but it had more attacks," said Greene. "If we look at the least affected cities, what we find is Tallahassee is about five-times bigger than East Lansing, Michigan, yet it was the least affected city on the list."

Those behind the study say they are compiling the why data now and hope to have the results of that study out in the near future.