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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. 

Link here via Suzi.

 

Alex Eckelberry