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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."
The flaw that they detected was undoubtedly that the spyware could be detected. Duh.
Lots of petrified grits
But isn't the spyware in and of itself the vulnerability?
Damn, people need to get tough on this shit.
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
Isn't that supposed to be 1 in 20 WITHOUT spyware?
[sig] 10 + 10 = 100 [/sig]
From my own personal experience with family members, I'd say that number should be much higher.
Joe User just does not know and/or just don't care what happens inside their computer.
A few un-ethical, a few security holes and there you have it.
Scientia est Potentia
Download yourself a free copy of Ad-Aware from here. I ran it on my computer the other day and it found 22 infected files, that it cleaned up for me :)
No mention of the computer OS or archs.
Nice.
I don't what their definition of spyware is, but I'd be amazed if it was fewer than one in three.
I would have guessed one in two.
I'm a tech for a medium sized publishing company, and I find that the first thing I do when I get complaints of slowness and random unexplained crashes is to run spybot. In roughly half of the systems I check, I can find some kind of spyware.
Going by my former help desk experience at a college, and by experience with friends and families computers I'd expect three in twenty would be more accurate.
Though I tell people when I fix their computers from spyware, that I will do it once, put Spybot on their computers, along with Mozilla Phoe^H^H Fireb^H^H Firefox on their computers.
If they get more spyware from using IE over Firefox, then I'll charge them to take it out next time.
If that really is an accurate figure, then things are really improving. I, for one, hope so.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Most spyware remains undetected because it makes copies and backups of itself that are near to invisible. Although spyware is easily visible on 1 in 20, it is probably present in some form on almost every computer with an internet connection.
------- "A true friend stabs you in the front." -Eliot
In a totally unrelated story, it appears that at least 4 out of every 50 computer users surveyed have had an encounter with "spam" emails in the last two years.
Stay tuned for the next ground-breaking story about the near 100% mortality rate suffered by humans and animals exposed to di-hydrogen monoxide!
Any generalization is a stupid one.
We here at Spyware Inc are deeply troubled that
nearly 95% of all computers DON'T have Spyware!
To help capture a greater market, our newest
service will automatically install Perl(tm) spyware on any host posting to Slashdot, and even make it open source
We think OSS spyware is the future!
(Yes... this IS a joke)
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Cookies are spyware.
Dont accept cookies. Ever.
That is all.
I'm sorry, but that number is way too low.... I'm in a bit of a hospital/nursing town, and I'd say that at least half of the nurses-in-training I know have experimented with Kazaa and other music piracy services, and are usually loaded down with 5 to 10 bad (at least gator-level) spyware installs.
The only thing that has infected that "community" around here worse would be smoking habits.
As a fiel technician working for a University, i run into a lot of machines. When i did ResNet work about 85% of the computers would be fixxd and on the network after i ran SpyBot or AdAware (i prefer spybot). And on the normal faculty machines about 50% have some type of serious spyware problem. This number quoted in the rticle is way too low.
-Psy
You can't extrapolate from a University network to the general community. Half the computers out there are in businesses, and most don't run any software not installed by the business. Oh, and if the spyware can be detected by scanning, it can be blocked by a firewall. Want to bet most competent IT departments have already configured their firewalls to do this? So really this is only a problem for naive home users. Even then, if there are ISPs out there that will automatically filter porn for customers, shouldn't there be ISPs that will automatically filter spyware connections?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
If you run windows there are registry keys used to track your usage of windows media player (unless you remove them) thus, the ratio is a lot closer to 1 : 1 of every windows computer out there, more so with more recent windows OSes.
It's not the only program either, use a firewall and don't install software that you don't need.
- Dan
I think someone has a spyware detector that is not detecting some of the spyware...
That's absolutely correct. According to the article they only scanned for Gator, Cydoor, SaveNow and eZula.
Have you tried Linux yet?
I work as a support technician in the residence halls of a major university, and whenever I go to a room to try to repair a machine, I always scan for malware, and I NEVER find machines that are free of the scourge. Half the time, it's the cause of whatever problem they had in the first place.
I don't see these as functionally any different than viruses and think that the a/v s/w vendors are ignoring their responsibilities. Like I need yet another f*cking piece of defensive s/w.
Spyware makes it on to 100% of the computers in my network. I have taught my users to put in, use and update ad-aware, but I think even with that there is spyware it's not recognizing. I come to this conclusion thanks to erratic behaviour in many of my machines that is not due to viruses.
Some of my users like spyware. Hotbar is a good example of a program that's actually liked by a number of people. But the programs that seem to do the most harm are the ones that try to stay invisible.
There are two computers on my network that never have spyware problems. One of them is the Mac I do all my web surfing on, and the other is the PC I do no web surfing on at all.
Any company I found is going to be Mac-only. There's little point in tolerating the huge overhead associated with running a Windows network.
D
and how do you suppose to detect spyware with port scanning?
I think that traffic monitoring and packet sniffing/analising can give some results... but port scanning????
/ss
Having worked at a PC repair store. I would say that 50% of the systems we seehave spyware of one sort or another installed. The real problem are one such as new.net and browser hijack spyware that requires a reinstall of TCP/IP including recreating the winsock files in the registry.
:) We explain and explain but apparently they like comet cursor and bargin buddy more.
It amazes me that the same people comback again and again. We have one customer who every six to eight weeks comes in complaining that her system is slow. Volia! 500 or more spyware items. Apparently she does not mind paying 50 bucks.
We also do work for a mortgage house that get this installed and wonders why their customers get so much spam for competing mortgage companies after they email the customer.
Oh well, spyware and virii are keeping us in business.
Installing a local firewall is one way to deal with spyware. I recently discovered that some freeware that all my co-workers had installed tried to dial out. Since I was running Sygate Personal Firewall (there are others) I was notified that the application wanted to dial home. After some research regarding this software I discovered that it was only trying to send out my registry file and my IP address. :-\
There's a lot of software out there that tries to dial home and any local firewall that is application aware is helpful when it comes to notify you about what's going on on your computer.
is the absolute bomb...
Note the paypal link... throw the author a few bones; it's a great program.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
- University students and staff are probably more computer-savvy than the general population.
- They were only searching for four of the who-knows-how-many spyware programs out there.
If you're running Windows, you should have Spybot Search and Destroy and Ad-Aware. Not to mention a virus scanner and firewall. And run Windows Update for goodness' sake! Just more proof that Windows isn't ready for the average user yet. (Sorry, had to get a cheap jibe in there.Well, there was one on the page with the article. They wouldn't be hypocrites, now would they?
I wish the guys at NYU would re-ghost their machines every two weeks. I was working on one this week that probably hadn't been done since last summer. The virus definitions hadn't been updated since November, and there were about 20 spyware programs on it. Working on a machine like that is kind of like using the Men's room at the Port Authority bus station. Icky.
I've never scanned a network with a ratio of less than 3/4 infected with some form of spyware. But I guess it all depends on your definition of spyware. I personally consider any program that does something other than what it's advertised intended purpose is. Please hold the Microsoft jokes, I don't consider flaws in design as spyware, only intentionally deceitful programs.
Jamon
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
"...Gribble says. "We do expect that companies can and should use tools to scan their networks...."
Would't it be much simpler if companies just dissallowed their employees to install applications on their machines?Allowing users to download & install 'anything' poses problems way beyond spyware.
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
We use the Altiris Notification Server product to track spyware at my job. I compiled a list of about 100 "worst offenders" from sites like doxdesk.com, and cast the net out to see where we stand.
.EXE or .DLL or Add/Remove Programs entry.
Out of ~3,000 computers, ~750 of them came back with at least one positive. And that's just looking for about 100 known spyware apps based on the presence of a known-bad
That's a lot of fucking spyware.
No kidding. People are dumb. Every time I format someone's computer and start them off fresh, I install basically what anyone would need. They still wind up clicking on pop-ups and clicking links in e-mails from people they don't know. Or when they install their own programs they blindly click yes, okay, next, okay, yes, yes without reading about the 3rd party software about to be installed. Its a shame that these programs are out there and that they are disguised as 'ad removers' or 'virus detectors'. But honestly....if you get a pop-up about blocking pop-ups....and you trust it....you deserve it.
I cannot believe how many new programs are coming with spyware now. Worst yet, the spywares are not just cookie trackers, but keyloggers and much worse. Even some games install a scanner to scan your hd for any "virtual drives" and will not load the game if any are detected.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
I live on campus at Brigham Young University. Between me and the 40 other guys on my floor, I'd say about everyone has experienced Spyware, but everyone has removed it just with a little help from someone mentioning Ad Aware to them.
/.ers will admit that tons of people don't know about Spyware and what not, showing their ignorance towards computers, but are still angered by things like Clippy the MS icon who helps people with Office and with the simplicity of Windows XP.)
Really, Spyware is like the 8th deadly sin, spread the word and help people get Ad-Aware on their computer.
(As an aftertroll thougt, I should say this. I find it funny that
Mirrors my experience with my neighbors (most of whom are highly-educated... some terminally-degreed).
I've rooted out more copies of Gator, Cydoor, etc from neighbors, friends, and family members... I can't even count the infections.
I typically recommend/setup the following bare minimum set of tools to avoid spyware, hax0rs, etc.
Firewall (I like smoothwall on an old PC)
Current anti-virus, set to auto-scan.
Spybot Search and Destroy run periodically.
I don't think I've ever had to look twice at a home computer setup that took those measures... and the users invariably learn what to look out for (particularly after Norton keeps flagging all those MyDoom, Klez, etc emails).
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Not mine, I only have drives full of pr0n.
I say we just grow up, be adults and die.
It's not that Joe Average doesn't care, he/she doesn't know he/she should care! They trust their computer. The idea that malware can hijack their systems is alien to them. The fault is not the end user. The fault is with MicroSoft's default security settings leaving thier PCs as wide open as Goaste.Cx's bunghole, along with sinking Internet Explorer's tenticles deep into the core of the OS.
Simply setting IE to not autoinstall software over the net, or REQUIRING an Administrator password to install said software (a-la Mac OSX and some modern Linux distros) would reduce this crap by a large extent.
Don't blame the user for what is the fault of the creator. Is a car driver at fault if the car he/she is driving was shipped with defective brakes?
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
...is that 100% of these machines are broadcasting their internet address TO THE WORLD and no one is doing a damn thing about it.
That may be a little on the high side but, 1 in 20 is way too low. Spyware is as out of control as spam is but, most people aren't aware of it, as they are with spam, so it doesn't get as much mention.
I have always thought of spyware as a virus. Perhaps not as destructive but, a virus none the less. Thus, I have always felt that the commercial anti-virus companies should make their software to detect and remove spyware just as they do viruses. As yet they do not but, there is a major need for it.
Now, many people will start rattling off the plethora of spyware detectors and adware look alikes but, the fact is that none of these programs is capable of detecting all of the various spyware in the wild. Additionally, since they are all small companies or free projects they aren't and will not be able to keep up with the flood of new spyware as it comes out. Only the major players like the present anti-virus companies will be able to do it effectively with frequent updates to catch the latest bugs.
Of course, the immediate solution is to not use Windows but, that is not going to happen and even if it did, there would be spyware for Mac and Linux after a while. It's getting to the point that the little voice in my head keeps screaming at me to block off all port 80 traffic.
I work for a small ISP in the middle of nowhere. Often, we will offer our customers the oppritunity to bring their towers into our office if they so choose to fix a problem. For every computer that comes into our office, both Spybot and Adaware is run, and in almost every computer, I'd say about 90%, there is spyware. It really is completely out of control, as there have been computers with upwards of 500 items found between the two programs. 1 in 20 is a major understatement IMHO. I would have to say that out of the people I talk to, it's probably more like 4 out of 5. And then when the problem is Spyware, I say "Looks like you have spyware." And then they go, "What's spyware?"
Microsoft needs to fix their ActiveX problems. I usually tell people to run Firefox now days.
Becauese they're afraid people will click that for MS software.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
No Cookies == No Login == No Karma Whoring.
Just imagine what you're missing
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
AllAdvantage.com discovered this back in the late 90s. College students gladly downloaded a program that provides them no function, displays an ad bar, and has a TOS that says that their unused clock cycles can be sold to distributed computing projects, in exchange for a promise of a small payment.
Kazza is proving that you don't even need to promise the small payment to bundle the spyware, just free access to a P2P network which has a lot of copyrighted content (that it doesn't have license to have) on it.
The average college student is not majoring in tech. They don't understand what they're giving up when they run a service without understanding what it does. User education is not as good as it needs to be.
When they say "defective", they mean that the spyware is crap programming. Which is hardly suprising. People who distributespyware are the same kind of idiots who are responsible for most spam. It's a kind of spam, really, since it's a way of indiscriminately spreading information. The information itself, whether it's a blurb for some penis enlargment nostrum or a piece of buggy code that generates useless statistics about what sites you visit, is basically useless. How do make money distributing something that's useless? You distribute a lot!
Are you kidding? I work troubleshooting computers on a major college campus and I'd say there's some form of spy/adware on at least 90% of the machines I see. Dorms are by far the worst. Even people who are more adept than the average user seem to get it. Usually they call because their "computer is slow." I can't imagine how many people buy new computers because their old computer has "gotten slower."
Also, no one seems to realize they have to update adaware or spybot. They're using definitions from August and wonder why they're still getting popups. They usually conclude "the program just isn't very good." The same thing goes for virus scanners too.
Anybody who's designing a new system, whether security or UI, should spend a day looking at how most people use their computers. If you haven't, you might be surprised.
Microsoft proposes that their own customer data collection layer (CDCL) be installed automatically with every copy of Windows. Then any software firm that wants to collect user data will have to pay a fee for it. There. Problem solved.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
At least in terms of the conclusion drawn: "One in twenty computers with an internet connection may be harbouring unwanted "spyware" programs..."
Their sample was computers at a college. You've got a highly wired place with people using them for all sorts of things, and comparatively little training on what and what not to do. Plus you've got younger users, many of which aren't old enough yet to not know everything, and feel free to ignore the warnings and admonishments (mark it flamebait if you like; I've taught such people and run a computerized lab. I know what they do and how they think, and so did I back then). Plus, you've got installs and re-installs (the common fix for everything Windozish) often being done by student workers with as comprehensive training in system security as they have in nuclear reactor operations.
How about a major ISP asking customers to allow them to scan for them? How about running a similar study on a large corporate system where downloading and installing external software is far more likely to be noticed, and results in far more than "Geez, we told you not to".
Biased sample, bad result. It may be right, but without better data, it's still bad.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The article makes no mention of the operating systems profiled, just the spyware programs that were listened for (Gator, Cydoor, SaveNow, eZula). AFAIK, all of these are Windows native and would not be found on machines that are not running Windows and IE.
Windows itself is not fully to blame for the abundance of spyware and viruses on the internet, but it's generally the people who use Windows that allow viruses to propagate and make spyware feasible due to their ignorance of their own working environment.
If operating systems are to become more transparent, user friendly and powerful, the problems of spyware and viruses will have to be dealt with decisively.
The average Windows user has no idea that there are malicious TSRs lurking in the corners, doing whatever they please. They don't have fine grained control or access to processes, because Windows assumes (correctly) they would not know what to do with that level of control. Operating systems are complex enough without badly implemented security policies, threading models, filesystems and applications, the cruft of years of application and user backwards compatibility making them worse. I don't know if Windows will get a re-write on the level that Mac OS did. It was very important for Apple to move forward and leave the old OS behind, it's way past time for Windows to follow suit. Spyware and viruses could be eliminated if the user was aware of EVERYTHING the machine was doing. Don't give applications a way to hide, and they won't be able to.
TallGreen CMS hosting
Speaking of spyware, the Federal Trade Commission is offering a workshop on spyware that needs comments. I think it would be highly appreciated if some of you guys would comment.
Why do you allow your users to install software?
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
I've seen an University which the system image they made, and use to install in all computers, was infected with a spyware (from a file archiver I think).
So, the whole labs (120 computers) were running spyware in the background. Nice.
I'm sure of it. I contend that almost every single user that users IE has fell victim to a drive by spyware install. I cleansed a Win98 box back around New Years for a friend of the family. That machine had more pieces of spyware than you could shake a digital stick at. Adaware detected 873 items to remove (bad cookies, binaries, etc). I shit you not. 873. Their machine was running slower than a 486 I once had that had Win95 loaded on it (oh my god it was awful). Spyware was stepping on the feet of other pieces of spyware. Xupiter, Gator, you name it, it was there. Their machine was only a couple years old and had been freshly reloaded (HD crash) less than a year before. This is a fairly educated family of two teachers, a high school-aged son (doesn't use the computer much), and a very small daughter (not old enough to use the computer). They can't stand a better chance of getting infiltrated any more than any other typical Windows user. If they had it that bad imagine what other people have on their machines. 1:20 seems extremely low to me. I'd rather believe 19:20 are infected/infiltrated.
"Isn't this like saying that two out of four strains of ebola have been found to be susceptible to anthrax?"
:-)
Nope, RTFA; Using a variant of your own example, it's like saying two out of four types of pinworms enable anyone, anywhere, to place anthrax directly into your system just by telling the pinworms that "food" is coming along.
I have always thought of spyware as a virus. Perhaps not as destructive but, a virus none the less.
A large portion of my work is field service on home PCs. Spyware has actually become a more destructive problem than viruses for most of my residential clients who already have adequate virus protection.
Most people will have one or two spyware apps like Gator on their machines, which won't impact performance enough for them to notice. But if they have kids it's a different story. Kids download and install EVERYTHING until all the competing spyware renders the internet connection too slow to be usable. DNS requests are often hijacked and when that stops working they are dead in the water.
I get over 600 hits in an Ad-aware scan on a regular basis on machines where kids have access. I also return again and again to the same clients for the same problem. My favorites are the ones who download and install multiple "free" spyware-supported popup blockers, which just add fuel to the fire.
Ah....for all of you who are going to continue jumping in with "1 in 20? more like 1 in 1..." without reading the article...
:-)
The "1 in 20" figure the researchers got was not from scanning the HDDs with Spybot/AdAware/etc....they sniffed for known packets from FOUR of the significantly more than four known malwares.
So, to be detected at all, the machines had to be running and the spyware loaded and actively broadcasting packets during the sampling period. Given this lack of an exhaustive check, the 1 in 20 figure doesn't surprise me. (We all know it is 1 in 1...
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
New Scientist is just carrying their little summary; one of the authors has the paper available on his site in HTML, PDF, and PostScript forms. It's to be presented at NSDI '04.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
I work in a campus Student Computing Helpdesk, and with the scans we run on most of the computers brought in, about 80-90% have a virus, trojan, or downloader (as found by AVG). I *never* see a computer where Spybot cannot find spyware, though to be fair, it will also find cookies and shortcuts. The computers that really worry me are the 25% that have a browser hijacker, such as CoolWeb. I've seen ones where every page request will redirect you to incredifind.com. We use CWShredder to clear up those. Side note: If you remove spyware from your computer and suddenly all your internet applications stop working, you possibly removed a spyware program that had rooted itself into Winsock. Try WinsockFix to clear that up.
One in twenty? More like one in five or worse. Of course, UW only looked for four pieces of spyware. IIRC, the latest Spybot definition file has over 12,000 entries (not all of which are covered by the strict definition of "spyware", but still...).
My current job is doing graphics and web work for a small computer services company, but at least once per week I go out on service and maintenance calls for our clients. At one place, the spyware infection rate was closer to 80%: Gator/Claria, Bonzi Buddy, Vomit Cursor, HiWire, IGetNet, BestWeb, Bargain Buddy, etc. One machine had 477 separate pieces of spyware and browser hijackers. Another had 25 instances of the same pr0n dialer. Even the ones that were relatively "clean" still had crapware like Webshots or WeatherBug that brought these commodity PCs to their knees. And don't get me started on Kazaa...
When I started doing this, I'd cut the users a lot of slack, letting them keep their Webshots or Benadryl Desktop Allergy Alerts. But after a month, the BOFH-nature possessed me. I have become an IT fascist: NO WEATHERBUG FOR YOU! NEXT!!!
Gah. Now I'm pissed. I think I'll go in tomorrow and schedule scandisks and defrags for 9AM Monday morning. That'll learn 'em.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
At my schools help desk we always run adaware on finished machines. I have yet to see one without spyware. Our office record was just bumped up to 8084 pieces of spyware. 1 in 20 does not do justice to the growing problem of this malicious software.
That's simply not done here at the UW. A number of the larger computer labs here on campus do have automatic re-distribution on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule, particularly in the CS department. The vast majority of faculty and staff computers sit relatively untouched (and in many cases probably unpatched!) year after year. If they spectacularly fail, then they get the full reinstall treatment. Almost certainly they don't get this preventatively.
The reason for this? Look at the actual paper - 31,000 hosts monitored over 1 week in August. That means a token number of those were actually student computers in the Res. Halls, since they are mostly closed for the summer. It's primarily staff machines. Ghosting them weekly would be a ridiculous amount of work, given the small size of most IT groups here.
Consider, for the moment, the department of Psychology. They have two full-time staff that manage on the order of ~500 machines spread across six or more buildings. Most of the other departments are in a similar boat - competent IT staff are too expensive and funding for infrastructure is too low. The large computer labs, the CSE/EE department, and the hospital have IT pretty well under control. The general feel is that the rest of the folks, particularly in Arts & Sciences really ought to work together better to centralize administration. Of course no one is willing to give up local control over their systems. So it's a big mess. The actual important systems are in general locked away running on big servers, and everything else is treated as a fully untrusted system.
I'd wager that we're not too far off the mark for most other large public Universities. On the ground, the beauracracy starts mattering alot more than the tech. (Unfortunately)
You can configure a firewall to block the outgoing communication that spyware clients attempt to establish with their servers. You CANNOT configure a firewall to prevent users from clicking the shiny pop-up and infecting themselves with the spyware in the first place, and blocking the spyware communication does NOT mitigate the damage to the OS that the spyware generally does - in fact, it often makes it considerably worse, since many instances of spyware go absolutely bugfuck nuts when they can't contact home and may hold up vital processes waiting for that connection to be made, or send the computer into a semi-race condition trying over and over and over again to make that connection.
Coming soon to Slashdot: meta-meta-moderation!
My family went nuts about kazaa when it came out... and everyone of them has called me because they can't even use their computer anymore.
All I can say is thank god for Spybot S+D
-Adam C. Greenfield
22 Infected files is pretty low in my opinion. You run a pretty tight ship on your box.
We have to clean spyware off of student PC's on campus since it screws up internet connections and F-Secure goes nuts to the point where it wont talk to the server anymore.
So far, the Ad-Aware record is 17039 from a student that had a spyware app that put 19000 internet shortcuts in her favorites directory. Number two is 1973 and number Three is 1058.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
for mentioning that. I find that OE is a tool of the devil. So many people use that preview pane....
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I gotta agree with this. I'm an admin and have to clean up this kind of crap both in the office and at customer sites.
Often times there are odd, often random errors in applications, and it begins to get worse. Or the system even if it's fast begins to crawl. I would say that 8 out of 10 times, it's spyware. In one case I found, according to SpyBot Search and Destroy (excellent tool by the way), 311 spybots and adware shits. This particular system went from the mouse barely moving on a 2.4GHz P4 with DDR ram to what it should have been.
User education is key here. But that is a depressing role to try to be educator, because it's almost all completely ignored.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
I know for a fact a large majority of computers not only have spyware/adware installed on them, look at how many DMCA complaints are filed on networks that install that shit with their junkware, but the source of it is not addressed. Look for instance at AOL's little bit about PopUp blocking and Earthlink's attempt. That software might stop the visible effect of a compromised machine, but does it shut the ports it may open and stop the sending of data/spam still or local harvesting of email addresses?
As long as Ma and Pa kettle think things are fine because the pop-ups are blocked they are not going to accept responsibility for their computer. Some may try to fault the scientific background of this study but I think it shows a pretty conservative number actually. Of those with compromised machines, how many knew about it? How many cared about it? How many tried to take responsibility for their compuer and fix it? This article shows a true lack of responsibility when it comes to ownership and maintenance of a computer. This same mentality affords the script kiddies what they need to send out their generated packages they wouldn't be able to read the code for and understand to save their lives. So Ma and Pa kettle blindly infect and install the most horrible crap on their machine connected to a global network and share their personal information/habits as well as the malicious love.
Accountability and education needs to stop being replaced by flashy eye candy ads and ignorance as an excuse.
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
Not anymore. Internet Explorer removed the parsing of the @ sign in URLs because of their heavy use by fraudulent e-mails (since it's not *required* by the HTTP RFC, just a *feature*). Well you know what happens when only 5% of the web browsers out there can support something...
Educating users and fighting windmills feel about the same to me...
Oh, wait... windmills at least do not say "but i didn't *do* anything! really!"...
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
Using mozilla firefox with the adblock plugin, I have been almost completely spyware-free. If you use wildcards properly (like *.doubleclick.net/*) you can block all ads, cookies and scripts from adservers or directories. Once you have a sizeable list, you won't get anymore nasties invading your system, and pages will load much faster.
There's not a lot to be missed after that. Process Explorer is also good for finding processes running that might not be of obvious origin.
Only 1 out of 20 computers at the University of Washington is running Windows?? Good for them!
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
I expected Windows' marketshare to be much more prominent.
I started working as a computer teacher for a Catholic middle school in September. When I got there every computer had spyware. On one computer Ad-Aware identified almost 400 items! Needless to say, every class got a lecture about internet security. Most of them took it to heart, and now mostly we just get unwanted cookies.
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
Reference
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Seriously, I'm not trolling, but has Bill Gates or Steve Balmer made any kind of statement of what the Microsoft Way of dealing with spam might be?
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
I'm a resident here in the dorms at the University of Washington.
I think the reason that the findings were 1 out of 20 is they included all the machines on campus. Those in the labs usually get some type of re-imaging done everytime someone logs out, wiping out all changes and thus getting rid of spyware.
But in the dorms where the students manage their own computers, I would say that the numbers are closer to 19 out of 20 computers have some type of spyware. I probably get someone knocking on my door at least once a day wanting me to help them figure out why their computer is slower than dirt and show random popups all the time. Face it, if you use Internet Explorer for web browsing, you're going to get infected!
I have a small computer business and every system I have checked in the last year is infested to one degree or another. I do my best to educate folks, but they're all calling me back out to help them get rid of the popups or speed up their slow internet connections in about 4-5 months. It's a very bad situation and getting worse.
So the ten out of eleven machines belonging to friends and relatives that I've installed Ad-aware on over the last couple of months imply the existance of 190 well-maintained, popup-free, efficient machines that aren't presenting somebody's grandmother the chance to enlarge her penis? One-in-twenty says to me that nineteen out of twenty aren't nitwits. Hell, my commute shows that one out of maybe six should be allowed to use a car, let alone something requiring thought.
This is not my sandwich.