Spyware on One in Twenty Computers?

SpaceDonkey writes "New Scientist reports that researchers at the University of Washington carried out a scan of the campus network for signs of spyware. They found spyware lurking on more than one in 20 machines and also discovered a serious vulnerability in two of the four spyware programs they looked for."

Comments

Re:Spyware flaw

[nemesisj]

This has been pretty much my experience as well. I've found that every computer I've used which belonged to a home user/college student in the last year was ridden with spyware.

Girls seem to average around 250-350 infections, while guys tend to be around 150-250. This is anecdotal for sure, but it's what I've observed. Draw your own conclusions.

I've found that the best solution is to switch users to Mozilla-Firefox (most spyware automatically infects default installs of IE just by visiting the page), install Spybot S&D to run daily, and also install Adaware to check consistently.

This combined with a stern lecture on the evils of Kazaa and arbitrarily running attachments has seemed to help the problem some (still not solved) for most of the people I regularly come in contact it.