Slashdot Mirror
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."
Spyware is down partailly because part of the newspeak is not to call "legitimate" purveyors of surveillance software "spyware." This has, for instance, lead Microsoft to change the recommendation for such select pieces of software to "ignore" from "remove" and has decreased their listed severity rating.
I blew up and started obliterating every add I could when Drudge Report went around Firefox's built-in popup blocking. Prior to that, I'd been blocking images from ad servers that served women in swimsuits (or less), since I won't look at a woman dressed like that unless I'm married to her. That meant I was missing most of Slashdot's ads.
I've never had any qualms about blocking the ads, and have been saying for a long time that we'll just she a shift in the "ecology" of website funding. Some will continue to be funded by ads, more will become funded by donations or subscriptions. Some will continue to be funded by private individuals or companies.
I keep hearing two-bit webmasters on slashdot prophesy Armageddon on the web because of people like me. Yet life has continued to go on, and it's nice to see someone putting out content on the Internet who does not think that ad blocking is going to cause the sky to fall.
I run only a handful of websites; one is supported by user donations, and the others are not yet big enough to need anything other than about $10/year from me.
I'm a much happier man since I started skipping all ads on the Internet. We also quit watching television other than recorded shows where we could skip the ads, or purchased movies with no ads (other than at the beginning, sigh...). Much, much happier, all around.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
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.