AOL!
What the paper does not reveal is that almost all of the "93 spyware
components" get nuked on the spot by an updated adaware. It's ones remaining
that can be tricky if there is not a turnkey removal tool for the average
user.
From: "Mesdaq, Ali" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: The Hardware List <hardware@hardwaregroup.com>
To: "The Hardware List" <hardware@hardwaregroup.com>
Subject: [H] Some stats about infected machines
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2006 15:46:47 -0800
Here is a quote from a white paper from the University of Washington.
"In the span of just a few years, spyware has become the
Internet's most "popular" download. A recent scan performed
by AOL/NCSA of 329 customers' computers found
that 80% were infected with spyware programs [2]. More
shocking, each infected computer contained an average of
93 spyware components. The consequences of spyware infections
can be severe, including inundating the victim with
pop-up ads, stealing the victim's financial information or
passwords, or rendering the victim's computer useless."
I only mention this because of our recent conversation about tools and
philosophy about infected machines. Now I don't know about the rest of
you but I don't feel like hunting down 93 components and cleaning that
out. But when we discussed cleaning vs reformatting I want to make clear
that I only would reformat on an end users computer that was not under
my control. If I had a computer that got infected with something that
was very specific and I knew there was only one piece of malware on it
then I would definitely prefer cleaning rather than reformatting. It's
only in cases where the computer has been infected for long periods of
time and was never protected to begin with.
The white paper is good and is the type of projects we work on at work.
Pretty fun stuff you can read the paper here
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gribble/papers/spycrawler.pdf
