Still Big Threats Online, But Slowly Improving
August 11th, 2008 by Heather West
The newest State of the Net report from Consumer Reports has concluded that several major online risks- including spyware infections- are declining in precedence. Unfortunately, spyware still cost the country 3.6 billion dollars over the last six months, with over half a million households being forced to replace computers because of spyware.
While this is an intimidating figure, it in fact represents a 54% decline in the rate of serious spyware problems, even though a third of respondents didn’t install anti-spyware programs (about the same as last year). Unfortunately, the rate of serious spyware infections is not falling at the same rate as serious spam and virus incidents.
Consumer Reports credits the progress being made against spyware and other online threats to consumer education, improved user tools, and government involvement. Of course, the spyware developers are working to come up with new ways to circumvent consumer precautions. One in 14 households had a serious spyware incident, and spyware developers are taking advantage of new platforms, such as cell phones.
Like last year, we are pleased to see progress being made in the flight against spyware, and hope that legal and technical solutions to spyware continue to be pursued.
This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 3:53 pm and is filed under CDT, Spyware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 11th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
“…households being forced to replace computers because of spyware.”
I’d like to look at the methodology on this one. The statistic measures how many computers were replaced because of spyware, but the decline could just be an indication that spyware is becoming more invisible. If a spyware coder can write a program that tracks web history, for instance, but consumes only a tiny amount of resources and doesn’t create a noticeable slowdown, then that computer won’t be replaced by the user. Has CR come up with some kind of control for that?
This is more a question for them than for CDT, but you’re the one with the comment box.