One in six PCs infected by Spyware - Prevx

In its end of year analysis of the industry, IT security vendor Prevx reckons that the threat of rootkits seems to have faded from public consciousness in recent months, with key loggers and Trojans getting most of the attention

Prevx has a free scanner called CSI that looks for rootkit infections and it says, after a couple of months of testing, the results do not look good for users' PCs

The firm says it started distributing its scanner in October and early reports suggest that, out of 291,000 users who downloaded the software, around one in six had some kind of infection

At the start of December, Prevx added rootkit detection to its software and, during the first few weeks of the month, 114,000 user PCs were scanned, with 1 in 70 machines revealing a rootkit had been installed

And, says Prevx, the problem is getting worse, as the hackers are using a mix of polymorphic code, encrypted networks and compromised Web sites to infect users' PCs