A Crawler-Based Study of Spyware on the Web

Overview

Malicious spyware poses a significant threat to desktop security and integrity. This paper examines that threat from an Internet perspective. Using a crawler, the authors performed a large-scale, longitudinal study of the Web, sampling both executables and conventional Web pages for malicious objects. The results show the extent of spyware content. They turn the attention to the Firefox browser, which is currently the second-most popular browser in use. A common perception about Firefox is that it is more secure against drive-by download attacks, in part because it does not support ActiveX components, a common contributing factor to IE browser vulnerabilities.