For my Trustworthy Networks course, we had to write a report on a malware and I chose to write mine on Spyware. Every few days you find somebody who's talking about how slow his computer has become and everyone including me blames it on buggy software and slow hardware. It’s not until the spyware becomes very obvious and starts showing itself up that we realize what the real problem is. Did you know that 80% of the computers connected to the internet have some sort of spyware installed on them and 9 out of 10 people don’t even know they have spyware? The total financial loss caused by spyware in 2007 was $1.7 billion in US alone!
Spyware is annoying, really annoying but that’s not the worst thing about it. Spyware is growing like anything, so much so that it has left its older cousins the virus and the worm far far behind in internet penetration. And surprise surprise, did you think spyware was illegal like the worm and virus? If you did you were wrong. Current law in most places deems spyware legal. Not that the lawmakers want spyware to be legal, but the spyware makers make use of the loopholes in the law.
I came upon a number of interesting facts, figures and technologies when I was writing my report. A copy of that report can be found here. I have tried to make it easier to read for a non technical person while at the same time trying to fulfill the objective of a technical report. Hope somebody finds it useful.
