Follow-up to my post about a study by the University of Washington that found spyware is decreasing: The full research paper has been published.
It does include adult sites, which was a question earlier. From Suzi Turner:
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.
Alex Eckelberry