Posted: 17th Jun, 2004 By: MarkJ
Research from privacy firm Webroot Software and ISP EarthLink has found that one in every three PC's scanned during March and April had some form of Spyware or Trojan hidden on the hard drive:
Scans of 650,000 consumer PCs performed between 1 March and 30 April found more than 18 million instances of spyware.
Trojan horses are applications that appear to be genuine software programs, but instead hide secret and malicious code that can allow hackers to gain unrestricted access to computers while users are online.
"Consumers should be aware of the purpose of all the applications and files residing and running on their machines," said Matt Cobb, vice president of core applications at EarthLink, in a statement.Unfortunately this problem has been around for sometime and many anti-virus applications aren't designed to detect and remove all of it, especially since some could be part of an applications normal operation. More @
VNUNet.