More on the University of Washington spyware study
On Friday I blogged about the University of Washington study on spyware. Now the PDF of the study is available here. I previously wondered if the study included porn sites. According to the PDF, adult sites was one of the categories. The other categories were entertainment sites, celebrity, games, kids' sites, music sites, online news, warez/piracy, screensaver/wallpaper and CNET's download.com. It's no surprise to me that warez/piracy sites ranked the highest in downloading spyware. In my tests of such sites, just opening the web page usually sets off an exploit, never mind actually downloading anything. And by the time the malware is finished downloading, often the machine is trashed and rendered useless.
The PDF has several charts including one that shows the changed numbers in the types of spyware from May 2005 to October 2005. Two categories decreased - dialers and adware. Keyloggers increased from .04 to .15 %, trojan downloaders increased from 9.1 to 13% and browser hijackers increased from 60 to 85%. One note, all of the testing of spyware was done by scanning with Lavasoft's AdAware, no other anti-spyware software was used to detect threats. It's been well documented that no single anti-spyware or anti-virus app will detect every piece of spyware, so the numbers could have been different if several programs had been used. I have noticed in the last few weeks there's been a considerable decline in the number of new users registering at my SpywareWarrior forum for help with spyware removal. I hope that is a sign that spyware infections are decreasing. Who knows, if spyware really declines maybe this blog will turn into Suzi on SuSE one of these days.
Note to Linux fans: I did buy SuSE and install it on a VM but ran into some problems, which I posted about in the talkbacks here. I'll be at the AntiSpyware Coalition workshop in Washington DC on Feb. 9 and then away from home for 2 weeks, so I won't have a chance to install it again until I return.