RSSStudy: Adware Increasing Exponentially
By Ed Oswald | Published September 11, 2006, 3:15 PM
The prevalence of adware and spyware is increasing at an exponential rate, and only one out of every 33 Web users can correctly identify a 'safe' and 'unsafe' site, security firm McAfee said in a report first released Monday. The study's results are troubling and indicate work to stop the spread of these applications must be intensified.
While from 2000 to 2002 only about 40 adware families existed, over the following four years, that number increased over ten times to over 450 different families. In addition, these programs had some 4,000 variants, the company found.
Even more troubling was the firm's research into whether or not users could correctly identify a 'safe' or 'unsafe' site. A survey on McAfee's SiteAdvisor.com challenged consumers to correctly identify which sites were free of adware and spyware. Only 3 percent of participants correctly identified the unsafe site.
"[This means] that the vast majority are just one click away from infecting their PCs with spyware, adware, or some other kind of unwanted software," McAfee said in the report. Additionally, the company said search engines were exacerbating the problem, with some search terms returning results with as much as 72 percent of the sites infected with malware.
Another surprising discovery is where the spyware and adware is coming from. Whereas many would believe that adult and pornography sites are the worst offenders, this is not the case. Leading the categories is star and celebrity sites, of which 16.3 percent of the files are dangerous. Second is screensaver sites with 11.5 percent, and third is adult sites, with 11.4 percent.
The reason behind the continuing sharp increase of adware and spyware sites is that hosting these programs is becoming an increasingly lucrative business. In one case, an adware developer made as much as 15 cents per computer he infected, a much higher rate than traditional affiliate programs offer.
In some cases, adware purveyors are making as much as $10,000 per month to infect computers with these programs. They are becoming smarter as well, mixing traditional (and more legal) ways of generating affiliate revenue with the more unscrupulous ones.
"The mixing of criminals and legitimate affiliate-marketing activities confuses both merchants and consumers, blurring the boundary between malicious, unwanted programs and friendly software," McAfee said.
In conclusion, McAfee said that while security firms and law enforcement are doing their best to prevent the further spread of adware and spyware, in the end it's the user's responsibility.
"There is no substitute for end-user vigilance to protect confidential information from being taken and to prevent bot-herders from building up their drone networks," it argued.
I'm a newbie in all this spyware, adware, etc. I never knew all this was so prevalent and all the $$ involved. It makes surfing the web so exhasperating instead of fun. I got onto your site thru a Yahoo alert and I must say that you have a lot of info and I am very grateful. I'm 59 and now feel like I'm back in school...research, newsarticles, questions and lots more reading. I hope it will all be worth it. Thanks for having an informative site such as this. Patti
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|The MSXP PC at work has constant problems, individual and network. The OS X computers at home have none, individual or network.
Do you think there might be a lesson here?
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|Job security, oh sweet job security.
Keep clicking away.
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|OSX.
run with it PC fanboys...
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|I'd say 99/100 readers of this site fall into the 1/33 catagory. You see, we, are smart.
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|Call me the 1/33. Don't use crap browsers like IE, use common sense. Where is the test I wanna show off?
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|If you have common sense you can get away with using IE :P
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|I took one of these tests once, not sure if it was the McAfee one though. The previews of the websites were pretty small and it wasn't even possible to browse them. I assume that they were considered bad sites if they could infect IE, so though I was using Firefox, it didn't matter. I think it was out of five and I got one wrong, so I think these kinds of tests are biased, but I don't disagree with their conclusions that there are a LOT of people out their who don't know what they are doing.
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|So Firefox doesnt use cookies? That is wonderful!
Im going to switch from Safari right this minute
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|I use Mozilla 1.7.13, and I see NO ads, spyware, or any kind of adware trying to get into this computer. I set it up to ask me for each cookie that the website sets. One cookie got my attention, from this site which was a tracking cookie, and I simply clicked "Deny" and then no tracking cookies got in my computer! I don't like Firefox, it's way too buggy, while Mozilla was here for a long time. There is special extensions that would work for Mozilla only, and not Firefox. That's the reason why I hate Firefox.
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|Denied cookies list in my IE browser is now over 14,000 domains and counting :)
Also note there's over 7 sites that BN uses that are "third party cookies". Not a huge problem alone, but heck, it bugs the crap outta me when people make money out of tracking my internet surfing activity. Maybe I'm just a jerk or something--nonetheless it still bugs me.
By the way, just some of the cookies betanews uses:
doubleclick.net
atdmt.com
googlesyndication.com
adtech.de
smarttargeting.com
smarttargeting.net
2mdn.net
I'm sure BN will cut this out, since they do have to make money somehow. I do not hold them responsible for using tracking cookies (somebody has to pay the bills!), but *I* still disable them :)
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|...and people here are assuming Firefox (etc) are exempt from known and 0day exploits? Wow!
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