The Adware Market Report

Webroots’ advanced research lab has access to huge volumes of data on adware, system monitors, Trojans and cookies. The data is used to come up with the Top Ten Threats list. I took some time this past week to dig into the numbers a little more deeply. Now, a word of caution: these results are from the spy audit that Webroot conducts along with Earthlink and reports every quarter. The data does not come from installed versions of Spy Sweeper. (Think about it, if you have Spy Sweeper installed you don’t have any of these threats, right?) Here are the raw numbers for the number 2 through 7 most prevalent pieces of adware we found:

Gator (GAIN)		215,866
180search Assistant		203,707
BlazeFind		178,230
ISTbar/AUpdate		159,137
Transponder (vx2)		158,505
Internet Optimizer		154,901

These results are from 1.49 million machines scanned. So, if this were a market research report Claria (GAIN) and 180Solutions(180search Assistant) could each claim a presence on 15% of machines scanned. If we take the leap and assume that the sample is representative of the Internet in total we can estimate how many machines have each of these products installed on them. Using the reported number of “active Internet users