Spyware: The Top Ten Most Prevalent and Insidious  
by Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. - 1 Comment, Last updated 12/12/2004

Webroot, the developers of the Spy Sweeper anti-spyware product, this week released their “Top Ten Unwanted Spyware” list (is any of it actually wanted?)

The list was developed based on data obtained in scans done by Webroot, both from their own site, and in conjunction with Earthlink. The top ten baddies were each detected at least 50,000 times.

But quantity isn’t enough to get you on Webroot’s “Top Ten Most Unwanted Spyware” list, oh no. The product has to have … dare Aunty say it?.. “quality” as well.

Says Richard Stiennon, Vice President of Threat Research (now there’s an uncommon job title) for Webroot, ” We use the P-I index. P is for prevalence, and I is for insidiousness.”

According to Stiennon, the list comprises the the top ten which “are the most insidious programs in terms of prevalance and effect.”

On the list are both well-known programs such as Gator and the Gator-installed GAIN (discussed by Aunty this month here), as well as lessor-known, but still highly troublesome programs such as PurityScan, CoolWebSearch, Perfect Keylogger, n-CASE, KeenValue, TIBS Dialer, Transponder and ISTbar, and Internet Optimizer, the last of which was also detailed for you by Aunty here.

WebRoot claims that their products will remove all of these spyware programs, and more.

For Aunty’s part, she sure is glad to be running a Mac!

You can read more about this at TechWeb, and you can try WebRoot’s free spyware scan here.