Spyware Business Worth Billions?

How could it be that spyware is still an industry worth billions of dollars? Are we not smarter to the threat of spyware? Well, a small portion of the population is, but there are still thousands of computer users out there who are not.

According to News.com, the spyware business is not hurting at all just yet. I have to say some of the numbers in the article surprised even me, and I’m helping folks with these types of problems every single day.

Despite reductions in the number of computers infected by spyware applications, the troublesome software has created a billion-dollar industry that continues to plague both consumers and businesses, researchers said on Tuesday.

According to the State of Spyware Report, issued by security software maker Webroot, the number of computers infected with spyware applications remains relatively high despite growing awareness of the epidemic and modest success in controlling it. Webroot’s independent research and data gathered by its Spy Audit service, which uses software designed to look for spyware, showed that 88 percent of the consumer machines in the study harbored some form of unwanted program during the first quarter of 2005.

Among businesses, Webroot found similarly overwhelming results, with spyware on 87 percent of all the corporate PCs it studied. Despite the staggering number of computers infected by spyware, Webroot said, the infection rate actually has diminished since 2004, when the software maker found an average of almost 28 spyware programs on each PC it scanned during the first quarter.

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