Just curious to hear other people’s experience with the level of spyware they encounter as of late. I have noticed a big dropoff (as measured by the number of problems found by spyware detection tools such as Ad-Aware and Spybot) in the past year or so. I occasionally will help out a friend/relative/coworker with eliminating these problems and I have noticed (completely subjective observation on my part, based on a small number of samples) that a first run of Ad-Aware, et al. on a previously very vulnerable machine yields a smaller number of problems than it did a year or so ago. Admittedly a lot of these are newer computers with XP SP2. So I’m curious whether this is a real trend, whether the tools I’m using are horribly outdated, or maybe the bastages that write this type of crap are onto new and nefarious techniques that are harder to detect and remove.
In your reply, kindly include info about your OS, preventive measures used, internet activity and browser used, and any other relevant facts. Also, if anyone has hard info on how the nature of spyware has changed due to the widespread adoption of preventive measures, please chime in as well. Thanks.