Spyware is expensive

Slashdot has an post up referring to a series of articles on spyware.

The key points being that 2/3 of user machines are infected with it and the amount of money being spent to deal with it is growing at a non-linear rate.

This is very good news if you are in the business of selling software to stop this stuff. Bad news if you are an end user. And if you make spyware products, it likely doesn't mean anything different for you other than another step in the cat and mouse game that is spam and malware.

On a side note I spent an hour yesterday here at work trying to track down all of the problems with a machine left over by an old user here (the machine had been sitting in a corner turned off but needed to be brought out in an emergency, but it kept crashing for "unknown reasons" relating to winlogon.exe grabbing all virtual memory). It had 6 viruses, 8 spyware programs, and not enough Windows updates.
That is partially my fault for not looking closely enough at that machine, partially the user's fault for ignoring what I told him about avoiding such things, and partially the fault of our multiple software layers that are in place to block/remove that stuff.

Posted by Eric at December 2, 2004 11:21 AM | TrackBack