How AdWare works and why you should take care…
It basically works like that: You download some program you want or to access a hidden area on a website. With that software comes a hidden program, that will rest in your system without any signs that it exists.
That little adware system sits and waits until you go to Yahoo or another search engine and gets a wake-up call by the browser. Now it looks into its history for how long it has been sleeping. Depending on how it is configured it decides what to do next, when you start a search on the search engine.
Some adware programs are configured to steal the first click from the first result page on the search engine and then fall asleep for at least 1 hour.
Other adware programs just wake up after 10 minutes of internet usage and direct your browser to the next available advertising partner.
However, these practices are not a rare thing - these are a wide spread problem for advertisers and webmasters alike. There is no cure, nor a real protection. Go and update your adware scanner is all you can do!
We check our files as often as possible, so people do not push adware to your systems via us.
(0)
January 25th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
[…] eWeek writes about it in their article here and I have pointed out the problems in my blog serveral times already. […]
January 29th, 2006 at 6:30 am
I installed ‘Ad-Aware’ anti-adware software on my pc & scanned it and I was shocked. It found a total on 336 infections in my system. And I was totally ignorant of these hidden adware systems, I don’t know exactly what damage it had done on my pc, but my surfing was bit slow & there were unnecessary popups too. The software also reported adware from trustable sites like alexa..surprised to see that!
January 31st, 2006 at 8:35 am
Ya! I also got adware from some famous sites such as about.com, but the software showed that they are not harmful for my pc, they were just the tracking cookies. But an adware is an adware afterall, why such famous companies use such cheap methods of marketing?
August 29th, 2007 at 9:44 am
Same here. Lets just hope the Spyware and Adware will soon be a thing of the past. With Microsoft now providing Windows Defender as part of Vista, lets hope that these parasites are soon gone for good.