Adware and spyware grow like Topsy

SECURITY OUTFIT McAfee has warned that adware and spyware is increasing at an exponential rate.

According to a report the outfit released yesterday, between 2000 and 2002 there were only 40 adware families. In the last four years, that number increased over ten times to over 450 different families. Some of these programs had 4,000 variants, the company found.

Some of the problems are caused by users who couldn't tell the difference between a 'safe' or 'unsafe' site if their lives depended on it.

In a recent survey on McAfee's SiteAdvisor.com, only three percent of punters could tell which sites were free of adware and spyware. McAfee claims that it is often not the porn or adult sites which are the home to malware and adware.

Instead it was the star and celebrity sites, of which 16.3 per cent of the files were dangerous. The next worst were screensaver sites with 11.5 per cent with adult sites bringing up the rear with 11.4 percent.

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