Spyware Statistics

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Our Content Security Research Team recently analyzed the top 2,000 spyware in the wild for the first half of 2005.

What is Spyware?

Is it an invasion of
privacy or merely
a nuisance?

They classified spyware into three threat categories, based on the nature of, and actions taken by the spyware program:

• Severe Threat – 15% of spyware threats send private information gathered from the end user currently logged on to the infected system: logging the user's keystrokes, logged-on user name, hash of administrator passwords, email addresses, contacts, instant messengers login and usage, and more.
• Moderate Threat – 25% percent of spyware sends information gathered from the victim's operating system, including the computer (host) name, domain name, logs of all processes running in memory, installed programs, security applications, client's internal IP address, OS version, the existence and versions of service packs and security updates, TCP ports the spyware is listening to, Computer Security Identifier (SID) ,default browser's homepage, browser plug-ins, etc.
• Minor Threat – 60% of spyware transmits gathered commercial-value information about the end user's browsing habits. This includes keywords used in search engines, browsing habits and ratings of frequently visited websites, shopping reports etc.

These statistics demonstrate the seriousness of the threats of corporate espionage and computer crime which companies face from spyware.

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