Security firm McAfee is warning the spyware and adware are increasing at an exponential rate. According to a report released yesterday, between the years of 2000 and 2002 there were only 40 spyware families. Since 2002 that number has increased to over 450 families. McAfee is saying that this is because most people can’t tell the difference between safe and unsafe sites. Most people probably believe that pornographic sites contain the most spyware. This is untrue. Star and celebrity sites are the most dangerous with over 16% of the data containing spyware. Screensaver sites are second at 11.5% and then pornography at 11.4%.

Despite the publicity about the dangers of spyware, infection rates throughout the world are on the rise. Data from Webroot spyware scans reports that 89% of consumer PCs are infected with some form of spyware. In the United States, the average home computer is infected with 30 pieces of spyware. It is strongly urged that all computer users purchase some kind of anti-spyware software. This software can come by itself or be apart of a security suite. Free software is not working. Spyware writers are constantly modifying their programs and most free software programs are not capable of finding the more sophisticated spyware programs.

Spyware infection rates have returned to the 2004 peak levels this year. Webroot warns this is due to internet networking sites such as MySpace, which are hotbeds for spyware. Many sites on MySpace contain links that will take you to sites that will download spyare and adware onto your computer. MySpace is such a huge target now because of the ever increasing popularity plus most of the users are youths. They are less skeptical of the sites they visit making them easier targets.

Ardamax Keylogger is a keystroke recorder that captures all of the user’s activity and keystrokes. It saves this to an encrypted log file. 

NetNanny allows users to either secretly or openly track activity within Chat dialogues and Instant Messages. It is designed for parents to monitor the chats that their kids are engaging in. 

Family Keylogger secretly records all keystrokes, e-mails, chat conversations, Web sites visited and programs run on a computer. The installer can then unhide the program and view the log of what occurred. 

Captain Nmemo is spyware specifically used to capture all login passwords on a certain computer. This program is being marketed to curious people looking to see what other people are doing on the computer. 

The UFP 007 Spy Spyware application is used to track all activity that the computer user does. 

SpyBuddy is an application that secretly monitors all computer activities including chats, websites visited, email, and applications opened. This program is marketed for the use of monitoring children and spouses of their computer activity.

Sc-keylog secretly records computer activities such as e-mails, chat conversations, and visited web sites in a logfile. It can also capture logon passwords. 

Cybervizion is a desktop actions monitor that will record all chat conversations, keystrokes, and websites visited. CyberVizion also uses video recording surveillance that monitors and records live streaming video that has been viewed on the web or locally on your PC. 

Perfect Keylogger is a program that tracks the keystrokes, mouse clicks, and visited websites on a computer and logs them in a file. It can be configured to periodically send the log files by email. 

UFP matewatcher is spyware that monitors and captures data from computers including screenshots, keystrokes, web cam and microphone data, instant messaging chat sessions, email, visited websites, programs run and files accessed and files shared on a P2P (peer to peer) network. It stores this information in a file for later retrieval. 

Where does spyware originate? Statistics show that more than 42% of spyware exploits orginate in China. The United States is in second with 17%. This is switched from the end of 2005 when the U.S. hosted a large number of spyware sites followed by China. Other countries where spyware originate include the Netherlands (7%), France (3.36%), Spain (2.14%), Russia (1.80%), Germany (1.68%), and the United Kingdom (1.63%).

Many users mistakenly confuse Spyware and Viruses as being the same thing.  In fact Spyware and Viruses are two completely different forms of malware that can affect your computer.  Unlike a computer virus, Spyware is very hard to detect because it is often buried in your computer registry, files and running processes.  Some other things that make spyware hard to detect is typically with a virus, it is associated with one running program, where spyware can be comprised of multiple programs. 

Current Anti-Virus detection programs are just not fully capable of completly removing spyware because of the distinct differences between viruses and spyware.  They are very good at detecting a virus signature but have a hard time at detecting signatures made up from multiple programs and registry entries.  I personally hate to have multiple protection programs running on my computer, but I have to go with what works. 

The next time you are on your computer, make sure you have a trusted anti-virus protection program and a trusted Spyware protection program such as Webroot Spy Sweeper.  This will help to make sure you are protected against virus and spyware threats.