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."

Comments

Link to the Actual Study

[pavon]

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.

Re:Link to the Actual Study

[eikonos]

According to the actual paper (on page 5), the level of spyware in general has not dropped.

"While the absolute number of spyware-infected executables dropped substantially between the crawls,this is due primarily to a single site whose number of infected executables declined from 1,776 in May to 503 in October. Except for that site, the amount of spyware we found did not change appreciably over the five-month period between our two crawls."