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| Study shows spyware problem growing |
| Saturday, April 17, 2004 at 11:46 by Laurence Norah |
The US based ISP Earthlink has published a report which shows that the average home computer is infected with 28 instances of spyware. Over a million scans were performed during the test, and over 29 million spyware instances were found.
Spyware or adware usually take the form of a program or cookie which tracks a users behaviour on a computer and sends statistics back to a central location for various reasons. It may be to help produce more targetted marketing, or for far more nefarious purposes such as keystroke logging to gain access to a users passwords. In most instances this software will slow down the end users machine.
Spyware arrives on a users PC in a variety of ways, usually without the knowledge of the end user. Cookies generally come as part of a web page, spyware software often comes packaged with freeware or shareware software. Often a long license agreement will hide the fact that you are agreeing to install third party software along with your desired application.
It's not all bad news however. Various companies already provide tools to protect and clean your computer, such as Lavasofts Ad-aware (a free version is available). Anti-virus companies are also expanding their tools to remove these products from the end users machine, such as Symantec's latest release of their popular Anti-virus tool Norton AntiVirus 2004.
As with viruses, spyware is constantly evolving and updating, so it's vital to ensure that any anti-spyware product you use is also kept up to date with new definitions files and so on. We recommend that to help protect your PC you equip yourself with some form of anti-spyware tool and run it reguarly, as you would an anti-virus tool.
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| spyware is really getting out of hand .. Problem is, on large networks, there is no server software to stop spyware from being downloaded and installed. In my case, i have already installed spybot and adware on every PC . But users sometimes dont run spybot or even update spybot.
Some content filtering software (like websense) can actually stop spyware from sending data back to its origin server. |
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| I have put Spybot SD on our Citrix servers and it initially found loads of spyware. I run it regularly and also use Webarshal to stop it sending data back. It's a pity there is no product that you can install on a central console and scan multiple servers for spyware. You could even schedule it to run it every evening. Most other servers shouldn't have spyware on them because they shouldn't be accessing the net usually. |
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| I'm sure such a product will be along soon to cash in on the situation... |
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| I hate spyware :P
just thought id say that.
Every single day i have to run anti-spyware softwares to remove them all. or go through program files and delete all the dialers, getor, c2media and all the other .EXE FILES that somehow are permitted to get on my machine and run ( thanks microsoft ! ) .. |
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