Company marketing programs used to distribute spyware

COLLAB distinguished with the APDC / Siemens Innovation Award

The distribution of advertising and unsolicited messages on the Internet has taken on worrying proportions, with distributors of spyware and adware to use training programs marketing, from real companies, to carry out their illegitimate actions, reveals the report «Adware and Spyware: Unraveling the Financial Web» by McAfee.

The programs are used on fake websites and install themselves on the victims’ computers, being used to «group data from marketing and distribute advertising «unlawfully, the security company said in a statement.

The report data shows that currently the adware takes precedence over spyware, which is increasing exponentially, since more than 700 families of adware with more than 6 thousand variants.

A recent study by McAfee SiteAdvisor found that 97 percent of Internet users cannot distinguish sites, with pages destined to celebrities being the biggest propagators of adware and not pornography as previously thought.

Between 2003 and 2006, attacks by adware it’s the spyware grew 448 percent, said Renato Lopes, Security Systems Engineer at McAfee Portugal, cited in a statement.

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