U of W Spyware study (with detailed report)

Notok · Feb 8, 2006

More on the University of Washington spyware study

On Friday I blogged about the University of Washington study on spyware. Now the PDF of the study is available here. I previously wondered if the study included porn sites. According to the PDF, adult sites was one of the categories. The other categories were entertainment sites, celebrity, games, kids' sites, music sites, online news, warez/piracy, screensaver/wallpaper and CNET's download.com. It's no surprise to me that warez/piracy sites ranked the highest in downloading spyware. In my tests of such sites, just opening the web page usually sets off an exploit, never mind actually downloading anything. And by the time the malware is finished downloading, often the machine is trashed and rendered useless.
Click to expand...

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Spyware/index.php?p=766

Be sure to read the downloadable PDF report, it goes into some great detail

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pojispear · Feb 9, 2006

lol scenicreflections.com screensaver website had more than the warez sites

since i want to re-format soon, i should go test my setup there

Osaban · Feb 9, 2006

Reading the PDF study of the UNI. of Washington, it appears obvious the differences in terms of security using MS IE and Firefox. Studying infections in 'drive by installions of spyware' using IE you are likely to be hit whether or not you you respond 'yes' to a security prompt. Firefox is less suceptible to these attacks, but more importantly it requires user's consent in order for these attacks to succeed.

I use Opera, and presumably it should be as secure as Firefox for these matters. Interesting read Notok! Thanks

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