Source: University of Washington

Posted: February 3, 2006

Spyware Poses A Significant Threat On The Net

Spyware is alive and well on the Internet.

That's the overall message of a new study by University of Washington computer scientists who sampled more than 20 million Internet addresses, looking for the programs that covertly enter the computers of unwitting Web surfers to perform tasks ranging from advertising products to gathering personal information, redirecting Web browsers, or even using a victim's modem to call expensive toll numbers.

They examined sites in a set of popular Web categories, such as game sites, news sites and celebrity-oriented sites. Within these, they found that:

 

The research is being presented today as the opening paper for the 13th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium in San Diego, Calif.

"For unsuspecting users, spyware has become the most 'popular' download on the Internet," said Hank Levy, professor and holder of the Wissner/Slivka Chair in the UW's Department of Computer Science & Engineering and one of the study's authors. "We wanted to look at it from an Internet-wide perspective -- what proportion of Web sites out there are trying to infect people? If our numbers are even close to representative for Web areas frequented by users, then the spyware threat is extensive."

The consequences of a spyware infection run the gamut from annoying to catastrophic.

On the annoying end, where most spyware falls, the stealthy programs can inundate a victim with pop-up advertisements. More malicious programs steal passwords and financial information. Some types of spyware, called Trojan downloaders, can download and install other programs chosen by the attacker. In a worst-case scenario, spyware could render a victim's computer useless.

In conducting the study, the UW researchers -- Levy, associate professor Steven Gribble and graduate students Alexander Moshchuk and Tanya Bragin -- used a computer program called a Web crawler to scour the Internet, visiting sites to look for executable files with piggybacked spyware. The team conducted two searches, one in May and the other in October, examining more than 20 million Web address. They also did additional "crawls" of 45,000 Web addresses in eight subject categories, looking for drive-by download attacks.

In the first two crawls, the researchers found that approximately one in 20 executable files contained piggybacked spyware. While most of those were relatively benign "adware" programs, about 14 percent of the spyware contained potentially malicious functions.

In terms of drive-by download attacks, the researchers found a 93 percent reduction between May and October -- a finding they say may in part be attributed to the wider adoption of anti-spyware tools, automated patch programs such as Windows Update and the recent spate of civil lawsuits brought against spyware distributors.

Despite that drop, the public should still be vigilant, they said.

"Plenty of software on the Web contains spyware, and many Web sites are infectious," Gribble said. "If your computer is unprotected, you're quite likely to encounter it."

There are a few steps that people should take to protect themselves, according to Gribble.

"First, everybody should install one or more anti-spyware programs," he said. "There are several high-quality free or commercial software packages available."

It's also important to keep those tools up-to-date so new threats can't get around one's cyber defenses.

Finally, Gribble said, people need to use common sense.

"You should download software only from reputable sources," he said. "And it's a good idea to avoid the more shady areas of the Web."

 


 

Editor's Note: The original news release can be found here.

 

Can't find it? Try searching ScienceDaily or the entire web with:

Google
 
Web ScienceDaily.com
Text: small | med | large
 
Print this page   |   Email to friend   |   Bookmark
 

Carnegie Mellon Researchers Develop New Software To Detect Viruses In Cell Phones And Other Embedded Systems (April 5, 2005) -- New types of insidious programs are burrowing into a variety of embedded systems in cars and cell phones, wreaking all sorts of problems. Here's what Carnegie Mellon University Electrical and ... > full story

System Halts Computer Viruses, Worms, Before End-user Stage (November 12, 2003) -- A computer scientist at Washington University in St. Louis has developed technology to stop malicious software -- malware -- such as viruses and worms long before it even has a chance to reach ... > full story

World Wide Web Worries: New Survey Shows Privacy And E-Mail Concerns -- And Trend Toward False Information (June 30, 1997) -- Users of the World Wide Web support government efforts aimed at protecting the privacy of confidential information, but believe the problem of unsolicited electronic mail -- known as "spam" -- can be ... > full story

Internet Dating Much More Successful Than Thought (February 23, 2005) -- Internet dating is proving a much more successful way to find long-term romance and friendship for thousands of people than was previously thought, new research ... > full story

Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
List Price: $25.95 Our Price: $12.99
Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid ... > read more

YOU: The Owner's Manual : An Insider's Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger
List Price: $24.95 Our Price: $15.67
If there ever was a pair of docs who can make the small intestine seem truly intriguing, here they are. Dr. Mehmet Oz is an alternative-medicine maverick and a cardiologist known to implement acupuncture during open-heart surgery. Dr. Michael ... > read more

The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition
List Price: $9.95 Our Price: $5.91
Composition teachers throughout the English-speaking world have been pushing this book on their students since it was first published in 1957. Co-author White later revised it, and it remains the most compact and lucid handbook we have for matters ... > read more

Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results
List Price: $19.95 Our Price: $7.70
Here's another management parable that draws its lesson from an unlikely source--this time it's the fun-loving fishmongers at Seattle's Pike Place Market. In Fish! the heroine, Mary Jane Ramirez, recently widowed and mother of two, is asked to ... > read more

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
List Price: $16.95 Our Price: $10.70
Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. ... > read more

Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
List Price: $17.00 Our Price: $9.12
Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is the glass-half-empty follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. While Guns, Germs, and Steel explained the geographic and environmental reasons why some human ... > read more