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."
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.