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Every 5th Call At Dell Is Spyware-Related

Posted by timothy on from the yes-ma'am-that's-a-feature dept.

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."

2 of 559 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Well 10%.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    Yeah good luck with that. Here in the *nix world we have several factors in our favor. The first is fast release cycles so offending problems get fixed very quickly. We also have security heavey design, user privelage control, built in firewalls and strict FS ACLs. Finally most *nix users are clever and can spot a phishing scam or shotty software.

  2. The 5.1% is useless by Guspaz · · Score: 0, Redundant

    If you read the linked article, they tested that 5.1% of computers had one of FOUR pieces of spyware, based on their NETWORK traffic. They then claim that this means that 5.1% of computers have spyware.

    There are tens of thousands of pieces of spyware, many of which don't use or need special network access. The study is bad.