Hey Hey,

I debating posting to this... I could almost see this becoming a Cosmos discussion if played out properly... and while I should be in bed... (I did some computer swaps today, which means I have to beat my users in... which means I'm gonna be walking into my office in less than 5 hours... hopefully).. Anyways... Enough of an off topic.. let's get on with the show..

Mr. Green, it was definately well written and thought out... were you really that bored today?

Adware is undoubtedly a huge industry... Back in March (2005) Richard Stiennon (of WebRoot) released some interesting numbers in his blog at www.threatchaos.com. The first was released on March 28th and announced numbers 2 - 7 in the Adware industry

(Italics throughout quotes are my inserts, comments and paraphrasing)

Source: http://www.threatchaos.com/archives/...dware_mark.htm

Here are the raw numbers for the number 2 through 7 most prevalent pieces of adware we found: [i] This was from a sampling of 1.49 million machines.. The actual number of "active' machines is reported around 265 million... the extrapolations are in the ()

Gator (GAIN) - 215,866 (38,400,000)
180search Assistant - 203,707 (36,200,000 )
BlazeFind - 178,230 (31,700,000 )
ISTbar/AUpdate - 159,137 (28,300,000 )
Transponder (vx2) - 158,505 (28,200,000 )
Internet Optimizer - 154,901 (27,500,000 )

----cut-----

Now, let’s look at how much money these “customer installations” generate. Look at my column in CIO Update where I go over the adware economy and come up with a number for the average cash flow per “customer installation” per year: $2.40

Gator (GAIN) - $92,000,000
180search Assistant - $86,000,000
BlazeFind - $76,000,000
ISTbar/AUpdate - $68,000,000
Transponder (vx2) - $68,000,000
Internet Optimizer - $66,000,000
To keep the readers interested, he released the number 1 a couple days later... No Surprise when you see which of the big names are there... It was CWS

Source: http://www.threatchaos.com/archives/...web_search.htm

Half of all machines on the Internet are infected with Cool Web Search. Yesterday I used some data that is available on revenue generating capability of adware to project what each of the adware vendors are doing in terms of annual revenue. If I were to use the same numbers to calculate CWS’s revenue it would be well over $200 million. It is hard to imagine an illicit group of hackers garnering that sort of revenue. I suspect that CWS is much worse at maintaining consistent revenue per infection because it is the Ebola of the Internet. It is so malicious that it tends to break the ability of a machine to browse effectively and therefore limits the number of ads and click-throughs that can be generated. Like Ebola, it kills its host before it can be productive.
If you very quickly do the math (if you assume only $200 million for CWS) you're looking at $656 million. That's a lot of money... and a huge industry to have a chunk of... but in comparison... how big is it.. Let's look at the revenue of some IT companies..

EMC (VMWare is a subsidiary of these guys) - Revenue - 2.24 Billion for 1 quarter... That's a revenue of 8.96 Billion for the year (if you assume a steady revenue, however they increased for 7 consecutive quarters so another rise could be expected)... You could say that their expenses are higher... so let's look at their net ($270 million)... that's 1080 million or almost 1.1 Billion (Net) for the year... that far exceeds all the Adware companies combined. (Source: http://www.computerworld.com/printth...101174,00.html)

Symantec - Revenue - 700 million for 1 quarter... again if we extrapolate that evenly for the year... that's 2.8 Billion/year... Net 199 million/quarter or 796 million/year (Source: http://www.symantec.com/press/2005/n050728.html.

Adobe - Revenue - 510.4 Million for 1 quarter - over the year that would be slightly over 2 Billion... Net - 156.3 million/quarter... over the year (625.2 Million).. (Source: http://stuff.techwhack.com/archives/...oved-earnings/

I could go on and on... but I think I've made my point. Adware is big business.. but in the IT world it's by no means the biggest business...

Microsoft has done a lot to protect against spyware and adware for users... You can disable your ActiveX and ActiveScripting in IE, you can obtain Microsoft Defender (Anti-Spyware), they provide the Malicious software removal tool...

Microsoft wants their money... and everyone knows that.. but they don't take additional effort to make it "easier" for spyware and adware to infect your computer... and I truely believe that Microsoft is software for the people....

Everyone knows Microsoft isn't against advertising... no one is... You've got banner ads, pop-ups and adware... Microsoft ads are served to use right here on AO through doubleclick (I believe)... MSN Messenger has ads displayed at the bottom of it... Windows Live and Microsoft Office Live are launching and some of the services offer free ad-based versions of the software... but you, the customer, are aware of this right from the beginning. I know a lot of people that like the Opera browser and were willing to use the Ad Sponsored version... How about people that took advantage of (and still do) NetZero's ad-based free dial-up internet... or places like these that pay you to have ads displayed while you surf (http://amby.com/tools/get-paid.html)... I know plenty of people that received checks from AllAdvantage.com... Advertising is everywhere... and most of it is known to us...

However now we get adware and spyware... but who's fault is it that we get infected??? Most of the time it's the users fault.. I've seldom ran a spyware/adware scanner on my PC and found an infection... I've also seen computers with 100s and 1000s of infections... It all comes down to the user...

Microsoft makes more money from the legit uses of Windows than the back-alley advertising... but they have to cater to their customers... Ordinary Joe Blow from down the street... He doesn't want to have to log into a seperate account to install his software, or click OK that he trusts a site with ActiveScripting on it... He doesn't want to allow every change to his registry or restrict the functionality of his computer... He wants it to be easy... So that's what Microsoft gives him...

Now you also have to look at this from the business stand point for the Adware Companies because I know someone will say "Why do they only seem to target Windows"

Source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Current trend is that Windows XP is growing fast. The windows family counts for about 90%:
January 2006
Windows XP - 72%
Windows 2000 - 13.4%
Windows 98 - 2.5%
Windows NT - 0.3%
Windows 2003 - 1.7%
Linux - 3.3%
Mac - 3.5%
With Windows holding 90% of the market share, why would anyone want to provide spyware or adware for Linux/Mac... Now if we take Richard Stiennon's number of 265 million active computers on the internet... That means that there are 238.5 Million Windows PCs... The odds of a Windows Computer visiting your site rather than a Mac are nearly 30x better... That's pretty good odds, 30:1 (No one's going to bet against that).

Anyways, I've jumped around a lot and rambled a lot... and at one point I feel asleep while typing this, so I think it's time to wrap this up..

Microsoft designs their operating system with their customer in mind... Their customer is you... well maybe not you specifically but for joe blow next door... There's more money in them playing fair than there is in joining the bad guys...

As a side note: a*user: you commented on the guy with the $3000 laptop... maybe he's a Mac person and didn't want a PC... many people simply won't buy them... maybe he wanted it because for a long time a Mac laptop was a lot nicer than a PC Laptop.. or maybe he thought it was slick and cool... Being Tech isn't cool... Being up to date is... That's what a laptop makes you... Most people have PCs today, where as 50 years ago they'd have had a typewritter or a hammer... It's a business tool... Why do people spend more than they have to on a tool (it may hold up better... compare a dollar store hammer with a wooden handle, to a nice solid steel hammer) or like Cars they want to impress people and enjoy the luxury... A Ford Festiva will get you from point A to point B... but you can be damn sure that no one that can afford a Benz, or a Porche... or even a Pontiac will be going into the dealership and asking for that Festiva..

On that note... g'nite all

Peace
HT