Forum Moderators: DixonJones
Earthlink, an Internet service provider, and Webroot Software, an anti-spyware company based in Boulder, detected 116.5 million instances of spyware, adware and other potentially unwanted software in the fourth quarter of 2004 -- an increase of 72 percent from the previous quarter."The audited number from the past year clearly show that spyware is rapidly becoming one of the Internet's most dangerous threats," said Matt Cobb, EarthLink's vice president of core applications.I am rapidly arriving at the conclusion the Internet just isn't fun anymore...
One thing to keep in mind is that these folks have a vested interest in looking at the downside of this story. Like most folks here, I run anti-spyware and anti-virus software. One thing I've noticed is that spyware software believes certain cookies to be spyware when that's just not the case.
Also, most spyware companies think any cookie that tracks a user to be spyware. Including, Commission Junction logging cookies (the way we check stats) and Google Adsense since they cookie and track users that view and click on their ads.
If these types of things were taken out of the mix, I image that big % would drop considerably.
Actually the 72 percent applies to the number of anti-spyware sweeps conducted by users of Webroot's own software --- not the instances of spyware detected. Since their company launched last June and they're reporting data for the last 3 months of 2004, you'd expect more sweeps as they sell more products, and more found instances of spyware.
If you look at the number of instances of spyware discovered PER SWEEP, the trend actually goes DOWN over 2004, from 26.5 instances per sweep to 25.
And yes, they include simple tracking cookies in their definition of spyware - Clicktracks, Coremetrics, HitBox, StatCounter, WebTrends, OneStat ... those are just the ones found on my system, plus just about any third party cookie I have, and some first-party cookies that are used for personalizing the portals I use. Unfortunately, when I restore my personalization cookies from quarantine, all my personalization settings were gone in the portals.
And apparently the software reports back to the company on what it found in my system.
The news media in the US are all too willing just to take a companies word for something like this without checking it out themselves. Sorry to be negative, but it's the truth these days.
My idea was to log the spyware and try to get the spyware company to pay me a cut of their ad revenue due to the fact that they were creating the impression that the ads were being served by my site and content, and I currently serve ads that do generate revenue and their software was basically hijacking my source of revenue.
I realize that they would obviously not pay, but if a good number of people put together enough log files I would think that one good class action lawsuit would probably put them out of business.
I've got about 1 year of logs and it is shocking to go through them and see how many programs appear from a single IP.
etc. you get the idea. These are some of the visitors I had in the first half of December 2004.
Notice the few dialers listed. Bet they don't know that sucker is installed!
