Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

You Are Here: Home » PC Security, Privacy » Reports on Spyware Reach Different Conclusions on Threat Level

Reports on Spyware Reach Different Conclusions on Threat Level

by on
  • Webroot State of Spyware Report 2005: ” An alarming rise in the number of corporate data breaches combined with a steady rise in the sophistication of spyware threats and distribution methods made 2005 the biggest year yet for spyware…”
  • A Crawler-based Study of Spyware on the Web – Alexander Moshchuk, Tanya Bragin, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington: “Malicious spyware poses a significant threat to desktop
    security and integrity. This paper examines that threat from an Internet perspective. Using a crawler, we performed a large-scale, longitudinal study of the Web, sampling both executables and conventional Web pages for malicious objects. Our results show the extent of spyware content. For example, in a May 2005 crawl of 18 million URLs, we found spyware in 13.4% of the 21,200 executables we identified. At the same time, we found scripted “drive-by download” attacks in 5.9% of the Web pages we processed. Our analysis quantifies the density of spyware, the types of of threats, and the most dangerous Web zones in which spyware is likely to be encountered. We also show the frequency with which specific spyware programs were found in the content we crawled. Finally, we measured changes in the density of spyware over time; e.g., our October 2005 crawl saw a substantial reduction in the presence of drive-by download attacks, compared with those we detected in May.”

    • [links via trimMail]

    LinkedIn

    Sorry, comments are closed for this post.