The Awareness and Perception Of Spyware by Home Computer Users And SME Companies

Spyware is seen currently as a major negative threat to personal PC data integrity, whilst seen by criminal elements as a positive moneymaking device through personal data theft from unknowing and security unconscious home internet users. This thesis examines the level of understanding of anonymous respondents to primarily Spyware, and the subjective understanding of it, as well as any security measures employed by respondents to defend against Spyware, a secondary examination was made in similar terms on other possible Malware based internet threats. The methodology employed was an anonymous survey via email invitation to access the survey via web link. Of those that accepted the invitation, 205 completed surveys were obtained from a home PC user survey, and 12 for the SME IT decision maker's survey; as such the SME survey response was a low level response from 309 possible email invitations. From resulting research analysis, there was found to be a lack of understanding of computer security, together with how to shield oneself from internet based threats more prevalent in our broadband world. The subjective nature of survey respondents ideas of Spyware infected websites, as found by past web-crawl research in 2005, was found to be objectively wrong for both the home PC users and SME respondents. Whilst what was also found, was a differential view in terms of level of threat between home PC users and SME respondents, though they agreed upon the same Top 3 Malware infections prevalent in both survey groups. Finally, to a lesser degree SME data pointed to certain IT internal policies as a simple way to guard against Spyware infections, other than the use of conventional methods of Anti-Spyware software detection and elimination.School of Computin