Posted on 12/02/2004 11:49:25 PM PST by Stoat
Corporate PCs 'riddled with spyware'Published Thursday 2nd December 2004 17:23 GMT
Corporate systems are riddled with spyware, according to a study by an anti-spyware firm. Companies voluntarily using Webroot's Corporate SpyAudit tool had an average of 20 nasties per PC, Webroot reports.
Most of the items found were harmless cookies. But average five per cent of the PCs scanned had system monitors and 5.5 per cent had Trojan horse programs, the two most nefarious and potentially malicious forms of spyware. The audit - based on scans of more than 10,000 systems, used by more than 4,100 companies - is touted by Webroot as the first comprehensive analysis of the presence of spyware within corporate networks. Webroot has been looking at spyware incidents on consumer PCs for some time, finding an average 26 nasties per PC. So corporate PCs are little cleaner than those used by consumers. Webroot hopes its latest survey will shake the notion that corporate systems are protected from spyware attacks by current anti-virus and firewall systems. Selling more of its anti-spyware software into its target enterprise market will be the happy outcome of such a realisation, Webroot hopes. "The enterprise offers a bounty exponentially larger than what the everyday consumer's PC might surrender to a spyware program," said Richard Stiennon, Webroot’s vice president of threat research. "Everything from customer information to payroll details to product specs and source code are all potential spyware targets. And beyond the potential theft of sensitive information, more benign forms of spyware, like adware, lead to increased bandwidth consumption and decreased employee productivity." Spyware applications secretly forward information about a user's online activities to third parties without a user's knowledge or permission. Typically, spyware arrives bundled with freeware or shareware games or P2P applications or through email. According to a study by analyst IDC published yesterday, the need to identify and eradicate these parasitic programmes will drive anti-spyware software revenues from $12m in 2003 to $305m in 2008. IDC reckons two in three PCs are infected with some form of spyware. ® Related stories The average PC: spyware hotel |
bumpppppppp
I recieved an e-mail (bulk) from my state senator..
I opened a link to the message, read it, found it interesting, blah, blah, blah..
Went on about my business..
A few hours later, I checked my firewall activity logs, and found that the senator's server had been scanning available ports to my internet address..
By "scanning", I mean it had started at port 3000, and progressively sent access requests to all ports available right on up through port 4000..
Luckily (?) my firewall blocked all of them..
Why my State Senator would be scanning my internet connections for over 4 hours is beyond me..
But I WILL be looking into it, and making a formal complaint..
>>at port 3000, and progressively sent access requests to all ports available right on up through port 4000.<<
That should have taken just a minutes, not four hours.
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