Report: Celebs, Not Porn, the Bigger Spyware Threat

McAfee's Avert Labs released a new white paper this week that explores the origins and threat of spyware and adware, and demonstrates how much more user education is needed to combat these threats.

The report, entitled "Adware and Spyware: Unraveling the Financial Web," discusses the financial incentives behind adware and spyware, how prevalent they are becoming and how practitioners use legitimate technologies to get their programs into cyberspace.

McAfee researchers say "adware and spyware distributors abuse the affiliate marketing programs of legitimate companies. In addition, adware distributors use front companies and Web sites to reach unsuspecting users and intermediaries, meaning that legitimate sites are finding themselves tied to known spyware distributors."

These programs install themselves on users' machines, usually enticing them with "free" software. Once the bots are downloaded, they are used to collect marketing data and distribute targeted advertising.

As of August, there were approximately 450 adware families with more than 4,000 variants -- a lucrative business. For example, one recent criminal indictment alleged that one adware distributor received $150 per each 1,000 computers his program infected.

One surprising finding of the report is that despite the conventional wisdom that suggests porn surfers are the ones most likely to be hit with such malware, "celebrities are a bigger lure than sex. The most prolific distributors of adware are star/celebrity Web sites," according to McAfee SiteAdvisor, a Web site tracking tool.

Perhaps the most alarming finding from SiteAdvisor was that 97 percent of Internet users could not differentiate safe from unsafe sites. That underlines the crucial need for more education from vendors and VARs to the organizations they service and their users, especially now that it's so difficult for even experienced users to tell the difference between legitimate and illegitimate programs.

The full report is available at: www.mcafee.com/us/threat\_center/default.asp.