« Google blacklisted BMW coz of unethical use of SEO | HomePage | Protect your privacy from Google »
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Internet full of spywares!
University of Washington study of spyware proved to be very interesting reading. They studied two periods May 2005 and October 2005, so it may be old news
"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 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. Source: Washington.edu"
They found that over 1 in 20 executables that they scanned contained some form of spyware, and 1.6% of domains doing drive by downloads. The main problem with their study is they only used Lavasoft’s Adaware to scan the executables, and we all know you really can’t depend on just one anti-spyware program to have a really clean machine or to detect everything. The good news is the total number of drive by installs decreased from 3.4% in May to 1.6% in October 2005.
01:07 Posted in Security | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this | Tags: Information Security
Comments
bellhop broomsticks emeritus,Freemason?plunderers direction.message
Posted by: | Tuesday, June 23, 2009