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Every 5th Call At Dell Is Spyware-Related
prostoalex writes "Financial Express quotes a Dell executive saying that spyware is installed on roughly 90% computers out there. Right now 20% of all Dell phone support calls are spyware-related. University of Washington research this March published a moderate estimate of 5.1% PCs running spyware."
I have been using DOS then Windows since 1984 and have never had spyware or a virus either. In fact I don't even run checkers constantly, just every few weeks to double check. (And for the record I have been doing Linux since late 1991 and not had anything there either).
If you are prepared to put the time and effort into it, it is all pretty easy. You don't blindly run or view stuff from other sources, you don't steal software (if you don't have the originals then you have no idea what you are actually getting), you pay attention to the dialog boxes that various programs display etc. Heck I even read the contents of those dialog boxes with legal agreements in them before clicking Ok or Cancel. Most people just don't do that, and as a result their computers end up with more "helpful" software than they otherwise anticipated.
To say that Linux by design is invulnerable is nonsense. It doesn't take too much to infect an individual user (remember they aren't reading those dialog boxes either). And notice how on many Linuxen, when you try to run an admin tool on your ordinary user desktop, prompt for your (sudo) or the root password and which then leaves a key icon in your panel. That is one thing that can be abused to go from ordinary user to root. In many cases a piece of malware could probably just prompt and the average user would type in the necessary password.
Quite frankly I don't know the answer. Signing stuff doesn't work. User education is futile - why should someone have to know about the internals of their computer, operating system, access and authorisation models? It probably comes down the programmers and user interface. Every time the software has to ask a question, it is being stupid. We need to continually work on the software meeting the user's goals without needing to be babysat, and especially without them having to make these decisions all the time.
I find it ironic that half of the stuff that Dell ships on their prebuilt computers makes computers run ust as slow as a lot of spyware. I know that when clients of mine buy a new Dell computer, they're disappointed at how slow it runs. Reformatting the HD always makes the computer run 10 times+ faster.