By John Leyden for The
Register
This article has been reproduced from The Register, with
permission.
Spyware falls into several categories. At its most basic,
spyware consists of programs that track online and offline
activities, which are shared with third parties without a user’s
consent. Spyware can include system monitoring tools that record
everything from visited sites to chat sessions, while also
including keylogger programs which capture keystroke information
such as usernames and passwords used for online banking, for
example. A bigger category (by number) are invasive programs that
feed advertising to unsuspecting userss more benign
cousin adware.
Webroot's study discovered that almost 55 per cent of consumer
machines are infected with adware; 21 per cent Trojans and five per
cent with system monitors. Adware, such as pop up adverts,
significantly slows a PC’s overall performance. How much of a
performance hit adware infested machines take is hard to say, but
Webroot reckons the figure could be anywhere between 10 to 90 per
cent.
Stat attack
The anti-spyware firm guesstimates that spyware is costing the
UK as much as £445m in lost time, productivity and in computer
repairs. How does it come by this incredible figure?
Richard Stiennon, VP of threat research at Webroot, said the
figure partly comes from an estimated £100m impact on productivity
due to spyware plus an estimated £345m based on the idea that
spyware infested PCs take four hours to clean. The impact on
productivity figure comes from multiplying the number of PCs in the
UK (30m), by the amount of time people spend online during the
average day (two hours) by a 20 per cent degradation in
productivity on infested machines by an average UK wage of £12 per
hour.
Stiennon said he used conservative figures in making his
calculations before conceding they were "not statistically
rigorous". He said he calculated the figures (on the back of an
envelope, we'd suspect) in response to a question by an unnamed
journalist.
Estimates on the damage caused by computer viruses are a
notoriously inexact science. The same seems to apply to looking at
the adware and spyware market, but Webroot, though honest enough to
backtrack when challenged, continually feels the need to trot out
guesstimates on the spyware market or (in this case) the UK impact
of spyware problem.
© The Register
2005
