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Study Notes Decline in Internet Spyware
Zoner12 writes "LiveScience magazine is running an interesting article about a new study detailing the extent and seriousness of spyware on the Internet, finding that it is still prevalent but declined significantly. The scary statistic is that 1 in 62 websites visited distributes malware. Kind of disheartening that this is a decline."
Whenever we find something new, we look to how we can make our lives better with it. Some people can use this new product or service to save them time or money, and others will use this new product or service to directly make money. Look at the TV, the VCR and now the Internet.
I truly believe that Spyware has always had a market provision for it -- to find a way to capitalize on this "new" medium. Initially spyware may have been created by the big media companies -- Prodigy, AOL, Compuserve and the rest. They never had any opportunity to really sell the informaion of their users, so most of them gave up the flagrant "violations" of user privacy. Of course ISPs likely still have ways to make money on user information, but not like they thought they would.
Spyware was then taken over by individuals and foreign companies who might have been duped into thinking there was a profit. Most spam comes in from out of the U.S., but the value of spam has decreased majorly in the last year -- not due to laws or government regulations but through the end user finding ways to avoid even seeing spam. I think by next year spam will decrease greatly and in the next 5 years we'll have forgotten it entirely.
Spyware is now on that last phase, as well. With firewalls and spyware-detecting software, the power of spyware is decreased majorly. As operating systems are released that are aware of spyware and the implications of being known as a spyware-enabling operating system, manufacturers will take a big step in combating spyware before the fact, rather than after the fact. Yet the spyware will be beaten down by market choices not by government action or mandates.
By the time the law is created, it is already outdated. 10 years from now SPAM and spyware laws will still be on the books, but the market will have provided users with the proper way to fight it. As the next generation of users is accustomed to requesting information in the the way they want it, spyware companies and spammers will have to find new ways to make a profit: they won't be able to trick the next generation as easily.
Yet along with the market ending spyware, the market also seems to be trying to find ways to destroy the previous financial structure of information -- advertising. I use Google AdSense to monetize most of my sites, but it would never truly pay the bills. If I didn't have people volunteering money, I'd have to look into new ways to pay for my time. I actually prefer not to charge for information, I'd rather get my thoughts and opinions out in the market so that I can back up my billable rate by offering people the knowledge that I spend a lot of time researching my businesses. Having to find a new way to pay for media you want (TV, music, whatever) will be the unintended consequence of our market decision to get rid of all advertising and ad-ware type of programs. It'll be interesting to see how quickly the market recovers, though, as it always does: to give the best balance between the needs of party A (the producer) and party B (the consumer).
87% of studies are made up on the spot
Did anyone else read the headline as meaning "there are less Study Notes included in Internet Spyware"???
Whenever I need to brush-up on my 19th Century history or Applied Calculus, I always read the source-code of spyware first...
Spyware will start to fall off (or become more secretive and worse) because everyone now has a copy of spybot or adaware or whatever, even my mum does (and she still uses IE 6 because she doen't trust anything else)... When people start to find them quicker they can do less, and if they can do less people will make less money out of them, so it'll fall a bit, also I've stopped going on porn, so thats 500000 less peices of spyware on my computer each week, meaning the distrobution is falling
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
What does most spyware do? Show advertisements and redirect browsers? Use your pc to generate spam? Track your surfing and purchases online?
Are not all of these things in the end for comercial gain?
What companies profit from this?
Are any legit? Or do they all offer you penis enlargement?
If so why not name and shame them?
Of the ones that are a scam, who buys penis enlargment pills for 1.99 or cheap viagra? Spam wouldnt be profitable if no one bought any products that it advertises?
Any idea what percentage of spam emails are responded to?
Does anyone else find the corelation not at all supprizing. Teh firefox usage increases, spyware goes down. Not to mention the good work *gasp* by M$ w/ their free anti-spyware app. s3x3s
Companies will pay top dollar to gather information about the public and their psychological habits to better advertise to them, but quite simply, are getting a bad taste in their mouth from spyware.
I predict they'll soon have their cheap security cameras routed through face recognition software under whatever security pretense bullshit so they can mark every face's buying habits.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Just like all types of software, spyware will eventually evolve into new forms... assuming you believe in that evolution stuff... it may be declining now, but it will eventually rise in a new form.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Its no longer JUST email that we have to worry about, or downloading a seedy exe file from a porn site. Remember that flaw in Windows images? Yeah, its being used for spyware installation. What about the flaw in the way Windows handles videos that make it possible to insert executable code? Yeah, its being used for spywar einstallation.
Porn sites? Spyware.
Warez sites? Spyware.
Mistyped URL sites? Spyware.
Spam email? Spyware.
So if I break into your house in the middle of the night and offer you great savings on various pills, and you physically have to force me out of the house..is it still breaking and entering? I mean you wouldn't have 'let' me in if you didn't want my great offers!
If spyware/adware is put into ANYTHING that isn't an obvious executable file, it should be labelled deceptive and illegal. Whoever then created said product should be punished, or the website's abuse department should be contacted (spammed by unique sources) with requests to take it down.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Pick the right sites and you can make it one out of three or one in a million.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Spyware helped make my p3n1s bigger
Internet Spyware has always been one of the best tools for proffesional spammers. But nowadays that tool is kinda obsolete. They prefer things like Blog Spamming.
Web Design Marbella Paginas Web
1:62 is not surprising at all when you consider the signal:noise ration of (good) information on the internet.
1 in 62 is a lot higher than I'd have expected, but then again, I bet the unscrupulous sites that distribute spyware get a LOT less than 2% of all hits. I imagine the only unscrupulous sites that do get a large percentage of the internets hits would be porn sites.
Last I heard companies like claria are still making a mint.
Maybe the decline can be linked to the fact that now these companies are turning around and offering consulting for the problems they helped propogate?
8hop.com
So 1 in 62 site sis:
- illegal downloads
- cellphone ringtones
- cheesy screensavers
- dumb ass hacker/cracker/whatever wannabe shite
I'd say that's declining rapidly, but not fast enough.
PS. I bet we see some people say Spyware isn't declining, Firefox is growing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!onnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnne
I wasn't aware there were any study notes for internet spyware.
1 in 62 is pretty low considering that 61 in 62 site are porn.
You complain about advert companies tracking your browsing activities, yet you probably just pulled up your knickers and flipped the light switch on before coming here to /., having just visited a voyeur webcam site. Oh, the hard irony. The real victim here are all the ladies in college dorm showers. I for one will stand tall and fight for their rights of privacy!
/. ladies here reading this and are emotionally touched by my concern for them, please send me some naked pictures of yourself at juicyjugiloos@yahoo.com, so I can match them against my privacy rights database. I work for the ACLU by the way, so your trust is ensured.
Any hot
When IE 6 is trusted to the exclusion of all else... be scared.. be very scared! :-)
So, is this '1 in 62' figure just a meaningless aggregate of all domains they found? (ie. we tried 62,000 web sites and got 1000 hits)
I mean, if the sites which inject spyware are all warez/download/music sharing sites, I'd not be surprised.
If, say, reputable news sites (like commercial papers and TV networks) are included in that number, then it's a lot scarier.
There's a huge difference between knowing that in some of the "more shady areas of the Web" (as the aricle puts it) are the main sources, and knowing that even the good guys have this stuff.
When I go into the shady areas of the web, I know where I'm going, and I take much more precautions. When I'm going to a known, and assumedly benign site, I might be a little less paranoid.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gribble/papers/ spycrawler.pdf
Here is the actuall paper[PDF], at the University of Washington website.
I tracked it down because I was wondering if malicious cookies were concidered malware in the 1 in 62 statistic, which would make it not so surprizing. I actually found that the metric they were using was much more limited the blurb suggestests. The number of sites merely distributing spyware was actually 1 in 20. The 1 in 62 statistic refered to sites that went further and used drive-by infection techniques, ie sites that used a flaw in the browser to modify files or registry items when you visited the site! See section 4, starting on page 9 for detailed methodology.
I work in the tech support department at my university and EVERY machine that comes in here has spyware. I see about 15 students a week and everyone is infected. My removal method is so methodical that I'm bored to tears sometimes.
I think as people have become aware of spyware, the run-of-the-mill varieties have become more easy to detect and remove (keep at bay). But I think this will mean that we can expect to see an emergence of very stealthy spyware that embeds much deeper and tighter into the OS.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Well...depending on how you look at it 1 in 64 could be good or bad. 1 in 64 of porn/warez/mp3 now installing spyware seems like a nice decline. 1 in 64 of ALL websites certainly is disheartening. It really all depends on what websites you are including in the sampling. I am sure I can go find well over 64 sites that don't install anything nasty...finding 64 porn/warez/mp3 sites not installing anything nasty would be much more of a challenge methinks.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
There's one reason for this decline that's not mentioned in the brief article (though it may be in the paper referenced): users are actually getting smarter. Strange as that may sound to your average BOFH, I do think that many users are growing a clue (and no 2x4s were even needed).
I know that almost every residential customer, as they're writing out a check for $100 or $200 for spyware removal, asks two questions: "How did this happen?" and "What do I do to keep this from happening again?". My techs and I are more than happy to answer these questions.
I've suggested a broad range of solutions (there's no one-size-fits-all answer here):
This last one is tough: some seemingly innocuous sites try to force installs on you. For example, I was trying to find the name of a song by some band, so I googled a snippet of lyrics and hit the first site returned in the result. Boom! "Would you like to install Vomit Cursor? [yes] [yes]". A client's teenaged daughter wanted to download "Doll Buddy Icons" for AIM (something to do with Bratz dolls and people on your buddy list, I think). Wham, 450 malware objects installed in ten minutes (I tracked the source by comparing the file dates of the dodgy
When you tell clients that there's no free lunch on the internet and that there are companies whose business model consists of taking control of your computer, you can actually see enlightenment happen. The heavens open up, angels play harps, and everyone is bathed in a warm glowing light. Pretty cool when this happens.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Though my experience is just anecdotal, I haven't really seen a falloff. I do see lulls here and there, but working in support, I do see a lot of malware still on computers... Using a small sample of course.
You'd love it here - BBC one, bbc two, bbc three, bbc four, bbc five, bbc six, bbc seven, bbc heaven!!
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gribble/papers/ spycrawler.pdf
For comparison, we also crawled and examined the new set of 45,000 URLs that we generated in October. During this crawl, both browser configurations observed a significantly lower number of drive-by download attacks than we found in May. For example, in May, 5.9% of the crawled URLs performed cfg y attacks and 1.2% of sites performed cfg n attacks; in October, these percentages dropped to 0.4% and 0.6%, respectively.
We also examined whether the Firefox browser was susceptible to drive-by installations. We found that only 0.08% of examined URLs performed a drive-by download installation, but all of these required user consent in order to succeed. We found no drive-by attacks that exploited vulnerabilities in Firefox.
Basically what they did was see spyware that was installed by just visiting the website, with firefox no spyware was installed without any user interaction, and only 36 pieces got installed after the user agreed to it. This is from a sampling of 45,000 sites.
On IE, in October, 180 sites installed spyware with no user interaction, and 270 installed spyware with user interaction.
One of many reasons I use firefox.
drive-by installs are certainly a major part of spyware distribution, but unless I misread the article, it left other concerns out, such as bundled installers, spyware distributed by spam, spyware distributed by bittorrent/p2p. Also, their sampling size for the sites was impressive, but I'm wondering how effective their analysis program is. Doing it automatically isn't foolproof
To err is human, to really foul up requires a computer
Oh no!! If you're not thinking what I'm thinking then I'll shout it!! This years going to bring us... Emo spyware! We can't stop it. It'll be out on the high street in those drainpipe jeans and the dark emovers and the eye-liner and the thick glasses oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no oh.
Or has malware become more subversive? Before it was something that was easyt to trace and detect, but has the decline actually occured from vanishing spyware, or is it because it has gone underground?
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
it can also perform such malicious tasks as gathering personal data or using your modem to dial costly toll numbers.
They're referring, of course, to the infamous XXX dialer malware which installs itself if you try to get your jollies via certain videoconferencing activities. That's at least five years old at this point.
What qualifies as journalism nowadays?
unless the denominator is meaningful.
Extrapolations of trends based on such rates have second order meaninglessness.
If you want to look at something meaningful, periodically sample user computers and figure out the installation rate of malware. I expect the rate has gone down though, because people vulnerable to spyware have countermeasures in place.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
At PC Clinic, the Grand Rapids Commmunity College Computer Club removed over 3000 infections from one PC, plus several viruses. (Including multiple Sober variants.)
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This is a living nightmare I don't have to face almost 1,5 years now. Since I left windows and switched to unix-like operating system that is. I cannot really catch up with how serious it has become since I don't have to deal with it. I do recall though the days using windows. Every single day updating, scanning, updating, scanning... I mean, the percentages became frightening. People need to wake up and realize that you cannot spend precious time of your day risking your computers purity and security. Maybe some people should consider making the switch after all.
This is usually the behavior I exhibit: Site 1 is alpha site, it contains the actual exploit code. Sites A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, ... (you see where I am going) all link back to Site 1 in a 1x1 iframe or something. They do not contain their own exploit code, that is Site 1's job.
beehappyy.biz, now down, was home to 4 exploits one the same page (some really, really, really old and negated by installing patches from many moons ago) including the WMF exploit. The usual suspect sites I went to in a virtual machine all linked back to beehappyy.biz. Once beehappyy went down, it was of absolutely no consequence to browse all the "popular" crack sites in a XP SP1 VM, admin account, and no patches.
Blame the user, not the software.
Yessirree, that spyware problem has been solved.
Kind of disheartening that this is a decline.
Why the hell is this disheartening? This means that Windows users *MIGHT* have less to worry about, especially as far as Joe Sixpack is concerned. Just the article summary alone tells me 'Decline in spyware/malware = better chances for Windows users to stay the hell alive without needing to call tech support.'
Saying that malware/spyware decreasing is 'disheartening' gives me the impression that someone works for the Anti-Spyware business and is trying to give everyone a sob story. Go away, Sir, plz thx gdbai.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
on their search results?
I've been advising normal people to "stay out of bad neighborhoods" for a long time, but the study found lots of spyware on games sites and celebrity sites in addition to the usual suspects (warez and "adult entertainment").