ADWARE: A Malicious and Highly Invasive Plague By Blair Ashworth

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There is a disturbing rise in the appearance of virus-like programs that hijack your web browser - changing your default start page and forcing you to visit certain web sites, thus inflating a site's traffic count in an attempt to increase advertising revenues. Sometimes the hijacked browser will intercept advertising banners and links from Internet pages you are viewing and replace them with its own (possibly with links to material of a pornographic nature).

Another variation of adware (and sometimes another function of an adware program) is spyware, where the habits of the web browsing individual are relayed back to the author, so that the user - and their email address - can be targeted with advertising specifically tailored to them. Personal information such as bank account details and passwords may also be harvested via this route.

The prospect of financial gain is driving unscrupulous developers to devise ever more complex ways of diverting and controlling your browser. In many cases their programs will block or remove the options that would normally allow the user to return to their original settings, effectively taking control of their web browsing preferences.

Moreover, a PC affected by more than one adware program becomes a battleground as each tries to impose its own settings over another's, often resulting in crashes, instability and lock-ups.

How do Adware Programs Work?

Every adware program installs and maintains itself differently, with the most persistent breeds using several devious mechanisms. I will describe here - without going into too much technical detail - some of the devices that the particularly invasive ones will employ in order to avoid easy removal. Within the registry are a number of sections where programs (such as those that sit on the bottom-right of the Taskbar) are loaded when Windows starts; when adware installs itself it creates one or more entries here.

A program lurks in memory, constantly checking for the existence of the above registry entries, instantly re-instating them if they are ever removed or changed. Another background program may also be loaded, with the purpose of re-loading the first program if it terminated. Both programs will look out for each other in this way, making manual removal extremely difficult.

Windows has a special diagnostic mode that can be a useful tool for assisting in the manual removal of adware, whereby the operating system loads with none of, or a limited number of, the registry entries mentioned above. The adware's resident programs may be monitoring for a change into this mode, and will include itself in the list of loaded programs before Windows reboots.

Often, if the adware program files are removed, renamed, or changed in any way, they are immediately and automatically replaced by the resident program. If your browser's Home Page is left to point at one of the adware's pages then your PC can become re-infected as soon as you next connect to the Internet and revisit that page. Several other ingenious tricks are used to defy attempts at removal, but I do not wish this article to become an instruction manual for the malicious developer. In my long career in PC consultancy I have been involved in a number of projects that required so-called un-documented features and in-depth programming knowledge in order to achieve a technical goal; the adware developer, apparently, is familiar with these and utilises a considerable number of them.

How can I Avoid Adware?

Infection can come from an email attachment, from a script on a web page, a downloaded file (media as well as executables), or even a program that advertises itself as an adware scanner/removal tool. Most of them exploit security holes in the Internet Explorer browser and an easy solution is to install one of several alternative browser programs (Mozilla Firefox and Opera are all worth considering).

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