Bad News - the Threat is Bigger than it Seemed
How recently it was – when even many journalists thought that spyware gathers mostly information to be used for targeted advertising. Definitions like "spyware, a.k.a. adware, is…" were pretty common in articles. Keyloggers and system monitors were mentioned as dangerous, but relatively rare. Until the Spy Audit survey made by ISP Earthlink and Webroot Software clearly showed - they are not rare at all.
The results of the survey are here:
http://www.earthlink.net/spyaudit/press/ and [http://www.earthlink.net/about/press/pr_spyauditsurvey/]
Reading them will be time well-spent for everybody who uses Internet and at least sometimes deals with information valuable enough to be stolen; in fact, it means just everybody.
"Industry experts suggest that these types of programs [i.e. spyware in general] may reside on up to 90 percent of all Internet-connected computers" – that's the exact quote. Considering the number of computers scanned during this survey (which lasted for a whole year 2004), there is nothing left but to come to the conclusion – it must be true to fact.
