Celebrities Beat Sex When It Comes to Adware

The Santa Clara-based, a provider of Intrusion Prevention and Security Risk Management solutions, has released to the public the "Adware and Spyware: Unraveling the Financial Web" study performed by the McAfee Avert Labs.

"The emergence of lucrative online affiliate-marketing business models and the widespread ease with which adware and spyware can be spread have made them prominent features in the threat landscape," said Jeff Green, senior vice president of product development, McAfee, Inc. "Since 2003, when adware and spyware emerged as dominant threats in the security environment, to 2006, we have seen the number of adware families rise by more than 1,000%, demonstrating a sharp increase over the last several years."

McAfee's statistics indicate that the adware fauna has evolved exponentially. In this context, the report revealed that in August 2006 in excess of 450 adware families comprised approximately 4,000 malicious items of code. Additionally, McAfee has stated that the nucleus of incentives related to social engineering schemes involve celebrity related subjects and not references to pornography.

"McAfee research shows that adware and spyware distributors abuse the affiliate marketing programs of legitimate companies. In addition, adware distributors use front companies and Web sites to reach unsuspecting users and intermediaries, meaning that legitimate sites are finding themselves tied to known spyware distributors. Programs then install themselves on a user's machine, often as the trade-off for a piece of "free" software, and are used to collect marketing data and distribute targeted advertising," revealed McAfee.

As for the lucrative aspect of adware, McAfee provided the example of Jeanson James Ancheta, a botnet operator, whose alleged proceedings derived from compromising machines amounted to $150 for every 1,000 infected computers.

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