From the press release:
This week EarthLink and Webroot Software released their third SpyAudit Report, which has tracked the growth of spyware on consumer PCs for the first half of 2004.
Since the SpyAudit report’s inception on January 1, 2004, more than two million scans have been performed. The scans discovered approximately 54.8 million instances of spyware, for an average of 26.5 traces per SpyAudit scan. Scans nearly doubled from the first to the second quarter. For each category, the instances of adware increased month-over-month, while adware cookies, system monitors and Trojans decreased slightly overall. The complete report is available at http://www.earthlink.net/spyaudit/press.
