Well said. Some anti-virus companies are dealing with spyware, but its far from complete.

I'm sick of having tools as inocuous as netcat being deleted as a 'HackerTool' when AV software should be trapping the stuff that believes my homepage should be set to footfetish.com...

I dumped IE ages ago in favour of firefox, however because of the omnipresence of IE in windows, the spyware issue actually spreads. I have seen a system where when you open control panel, you first get a porn popup and the the control panel. When you think of the web integration of Explorer -- the file browser.. you can see how this can start affecting other subsystems as well.

As you said, it just takes a single click and you're in for a world of pain -- adaware and spybot are pretty decent, but I have found them woefully ineffective in many cases.

I feel however that hte problem that needs to be addressed is not so much about stopping spyware authors and anti-virus -- you get into the same cycle of updated definitions, bounty rewards, variants etc which we have with worms.. the core issue lies with the insecurity in IE..

Malicious programs will continue to be written -- your web browser has no business to be allowing them to execute in the first place.



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