Bad Internet neighborhoods
The Internet is like a very big city. No prudent person wanders around the seamier parts of a city without precautions and the same is true of the Internet. Also certain activities like gaming have become major targets of spyware. Internet Week has an article that says
One in five of gaming site hosted spyware, said Levy and Gribble, the highest percentage of any neighborhood. Music placed second on the shame list, with 11.4 percent of domains infected (about one in nine).
Internet districts such as news and kids, meanwhile, were much safer. No infected news domains were spotted by Levy and Gribble, and only 1.6 percent of kids’ sites hosted spyware.
The article also goes on to say
Other data, however, pointed to additional risky neighborhoods. More than one in ten executable files found on adult sites, for instance, were spyware-infected. Ditto for sites offering wallpaper (and screensaver) executable files. But the worst locale, as measured by infected executables, was gaming, where 16.3 percent of the files were plagued with spyware.
In other words, be especially vigilant if you are a gamer or a downloader of certain things. Check anything you download with anti-virus, ant-spyware, and Trojan detectors. Make sure to back up your system before installing anything.