Spyware increasing dramatically despite ISP efforts to fight it

A report conducted in part by a local software company shows that spyware was on the rise during the last three months of 2004. Earthlink, an Internet service provider, and Webroot Software, an anti-spyware company based in Boulder, detected 116.5 million instances of spyware, adware and other potentially unwanted software in the fourth quarter of 2004 -- an increase of 72 percent from the previous quarter. Spyware attaches to computer hard drives when users visit certain Web sites, click on pop-up ads or view spam e-mail messages. David Moll, CEO of Webroot, has estimated that 20 percent of support calls that ISPs receive are related to spyware. "The audited number from the past year clearly show that spyware is rapidly becoming one of the Internet's most dangerous threats," said Matt Cobb, EarthLink's vice president of core applications. The results from the report are culled from the companies' detection programs that run analyses of Internet users' PCs and provide audited reports of spyware residing on the machines.