Spyware websites report

FYI…

- http://www.theregister.com/2006/02/07/spyware_survey/
7 February 2006
"Spyware programs that monitor users' surfing habits remain prevalent, but their frequency is on the decline, according to a recent academic study*. Security researchers at the University of Washington used web crawler technology to discover that around one in 20 executable files (5.5 per cent) offered for download on the net during a five month period contained some type of malware, mostly less malign code that generated invasive pop-up ads rather than more dangerous key-logging software. At the start of the May 2005 survey, 5.9 per cent of sites surveyed attempted to use security exploits to download spyware onto potentially vulnerable PCs. This figure for so called drive-by downloads dropped to 0.4 per cent by October 2005. Warez sites that offer pirated software topped the list for drive-by downloads (4.3 per cent of domains), with celeb sites (3.9 per cent) coming a close second. Although the density of scripted attacks dropped between May and October last year, spyware remains a substantial problem, the Washington researchers conclude…"
* http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gribble…/spycrawler.pdf

FYI…

- http://www.techweb.com/article/printableAr…3&site;_section=
February 07, 2006
"…Four researchers from the Seattle university's Department of Computer Science & Engineering created Web crawlers to scour the Internet for spyware, and found that the number of domains using drive-by downloading had been halved between May and October 2005. Drive-by downloading is the term given to the hacker practice of using browser vulnerabilities – almost always those in Microsoft's Internet Explorer – to surreptitiously install software without any user action. Its May survey found 3.4 percent of the 45,000 URLs crawled ready to infect users with spyware; October's numbers were down to 1.6 percent. "Overall, the density of drive-by download attacks on the Web has declined," concluded the researchers. Webroot's Stiennon, however, disputed the apparent decline in drive-by downloading. "We've seen large swings in the number of malicious sites, even on a day-to-day basis," he said. "It's a very very very noisy curve." It's not unusual, he said, for the number of sites serving out spyware to increase or decrease by 10 percent in just one day. "If they're taking just two snapshots, that could explain their findings," he said…"

(Hmmm… Whatever the numbers, we can agree on one thing - spyware is bad news. And if you get a bad case of it, it's REALLY bad news.)