Report: Rapid Rise Of Adware Is Tailing Off Slightly

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October 04, 2004 (11:03 AM EDT)

Report: Rapid Rise Of Adware Is Tailing Off Slightly

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The phenomenon of spyware, whose rocketing growth began disrupting millions of computer users in the first half of the year, started to tail off slightly during the third quarter, according to a new SpyAudit report from ISP provider Earthlink and Webroot Software, a computer-security firm.
The companies carried out three million scans on consumer PC software and found 83.4 million instances of spyware over the year to date. "Scans nearly doubled from the first to the second quarter and remained steady through the third quarter," the firms stated Monday. "While the instances of adware increased month-over-month through the first half of 2004, the third quarter began to show a slight decrease in the instances of each adware category."
"Spyware remains a serious problem for consumers," said Webroot CEO David Moll in a statement. "The upside is that consumer awareness of the threats posed by spyware is rising. More and more consumers are making educated, proactive choices to protect their computers by utilizing anti-spyware tools."
The survey utilizes detection programs from both Earthlink and Webroot, which run analyses of PCs using the Internet. The SpyAudit report noted that of the different instances of adware, the adware cookie category was the highest.