Spying on spyware - Report

Seems many more people have spyware than they think. That is the latest conclusion in this joint effort search and report from Earthlink and Webroot. In their latest results, it opens their testing (scanning) numbers to :

Latest Results (1/1/2004 - 4/30/2004)
Total number of scans: 1,483,517
Instances of spyware per scanned PC: 27.5
Total instances of spyware found: 40,846,089



www.earthlink.net...

Not surprising, really, given the number of popups and fake alerts you get from some websites. Even some fairly innocuous apps do a lot of reporting (Weatherbug was one annoying one I just removed from my mom's computer.)

Not surprising at all, spywares have become almost more annoying than viruses. Removing and preventing spywares have become like 30% of my job definition (gross approximation).

My only surprise is that the number was that low! Since consumer access to the Internet has become common, I have never, ever repaired or upgraded an individual's PC and failed to find at least one type of Spyware/Adware running on it. The only corporate machine that have been clean are those running on LANs without Internet access. (Those usually have only virii and worms!)

A freind of mine has been 'drafted' to clean junior's pc once a week, 60+ spies per cleaning, and he doesnt have the heart to tell the parents that it is becouse junior has been frequenting some 'less than 'adult'' websites.

im suprised its not higher. can you imagine your parents or grandparents on a computer on the internet? they have no idea what is bad and what is good when it comes to this sort of thing, they just randomly click on things till the window goes away.

I just fixed my son's aunt's PC, the virus definitions were as of 3/2003. she had sasser, blaster, a boat load of viruses, and several trojans, and im sure the spyware was off the chart. Oh and she hadnt put any of M$ windows patches on. This is your typical casual internet user.

The new SP from m$ holds some promise. Im hearing that its gonna include av and automatically activate the firewall for internet connections.

[edit on 18-6-2004 by spangbr]

Funny that this topic comes up now. Last night I decided to install ad-aware and AVG (Anti-Virus Gaurd... it's a good virus scanner) on her computer. I found 150+ things in ad-aware and 20 viruses... and she's only had the computer for 6 months

Originally posted by smirkley
A freind of mine has been 'drafted' to clean junior's pc once a week, 60+ spies per cleaning, and he doesnt have the heart to tell the parents that it is becouse junior has been frequenting some 'less than 'adult'' websites.

What if junior isn't the one surfing the adult sites. Makes you wonder

There is only one way to eliminate popups.....reformat computer, install ad-aware and some winxp patches. Computer works like new.

From what I am understanding,..the parents are not even AOL savvy.

They are not interested, and junior has free reign

Originally posted by websurfer
There is only one way to eliminate popups.....reformat computer, install ad-aware and some winxp patches. Computer works like new.

The bad news is that there is some spyware/adware being installed using exploits in Internet Explorer that has all the current hotfixes and service packs installed, as well as anti-spyware and antivirus apps running. I tested Symantec AV Corporate and AVG along with Adware and Spysweeper. It may be fixed in a stand-alone patch sometime soon, but it is lookig like we may have to wait until Windows XP SP2 is released. The Release Candidate 1 of SP2 prevented the istallation of this spyware. Until it comes out, try using another browser like Mozilla or Opera. I prefer Mozilla Firefox because it is free and has no ads on it. Either are better than IE, in my opinion.

ATS Discussions
'Extremely Critical' Flaws in MS Internet Explorer
Firefox .9 released

[edit on 20-6-2004 by Spectre]