Why can anti-spyware programs handle 100% of possible threats?
Ed Tittel: See my column, Spyware vs. viruses: Two different fights. Viruses tend to come in neat little packages, either as items disguised within other files or as attachments to messages of some kind or another. Spyware is both more complex and diffuse. It tends to arrive through a temporary piece of software that gains permission to run on a user’s machine from a Web site. It is a lot harder to recognize all the ways spyware can seek to take up residence on a computer, because it involves numerous scripting languages, active Web content of all kinds and any code that a Web page seeks to run whenever users download its contents. Spyware also has a larger frequency of incidence (or discovery of new spyware items, or variants of known items) and a much greater mutation rate than viruses appear to enjoy.
