Spyware Attacks on the rise! Are you taking care of your PC?

If not, you might be in the 89% percent of PC's that are infected by one or the other spyware component. I was at the site of one of my favorite columnists, Suzi Turner, spyware researcher and consultant, When I noticed the article and link to the report. She always has some good articles on security tools.
All in all it is a good report but I tend to believe it is biased against free anti-spyware tools.
It attributes on of the factors to increase in infections to Free anti-Spyware tools. Well I use two free anti-spyware tools and they are doing very fine and even better than some of the paid for software used by my clients. Namely I use SpyBot Search & destroy together with Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE personal. Between both of them, My PC/PC's are clean and Spyware free. Support and updates outstanding and have been free since I started using them a few years ago. I also use Avast Anti-Virus Home, which is also free with great success. I have used and removed well know solutions by famous software makers. Why you may ask, yes you may. And I would say, they are memory hogs, processor hogs and most of the time inefective. I have run Spybot S&D on a few systems that were protected by a well known Security software producer, and found and cleaned alarming number of Spyware. So those are the reasons that I do not use any of the paid for security software. Many instants these software pieces behave worse than spyware and rootkits themselves.
Want an example, Just google for "rootkits and Symantec" or click here
Then again I read that McAfee has come out with a inaccurate report (according to well laid out article by Security Curve) that put th blame squarely on open source community. According to Darknet's article blaming Open Source, is a load of sh*t.
Webroot says in it's report about the report,
"During the second quarter of 2006, Webroot researchers found that 89 percent of consumer PC's were infected with an average of 30 pieces of spyware – a slight increase from the first quarter of 2006 when infection rates returned to alarmingly high levels after a supposed lull in spyware infections during the second half of 2005. According to the report, new distribution channels, advanced spyware technologies and a reliance on free anti–spyware programs are all contributing factors to the startling increase."
Webroot, how accuratete are you? May be I would better read the whole article! Anyway Thanks to Suzi for bringing this up. I think I will write an article about all the free security software I am using to protect my PC's.

Tags: spyware, rootkits, spybot S&D, security tools, open source