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Welcome to the Viruswarning forums. All your original content has been ported to the new forums as well as new content and additional opportunities to interact with the authors of Viruswarn.com. You can always access old content at www.leedrake.com/forum . You may find some formatting was lost in the conversion and the older versions of the posts to be more readable....
But at least it's all here.
Enjoy!
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Viruswarn Forums
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Lee Drake
Posts:238
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| 07/14/2003 10:07 PM |
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| What is it?
A number of clients have come to me recently complaining that they're getting a horrendous number of "pop-up" advertisements from the internet. I'm not talking about the normal occasional pop-up you get when you surf onto NYTimes.com or aol.com. These folks surf onto sites (even my site) that NEVER have pop-ups and when they get there up pops an advertisement for porn, growing various bodily parts, miracle cures, etc. Sometimes they pile up 4, 5 or even 6 pop-ups at once. This level of pop-up (one for virtually every time you access the internet) can lead you to believe that everyone has them on their site, but in fact you've allowed an activeX control to be installed on your computer that is both tracking usage, and popping up ads.
While you should never answer "yes" to installing a control from a website or email unless you specifically know what the control is and what it does, everyone's clicked yes in a moment of weakness. Many of these controls use standard "user license" agreements that - if you carefully read them - reveal that you're basically allowing them to spam you with ads all they want. They disguise themselves as screensavers, free software - one advertisement tracking software even advertises that it "stops pop-ups". Well it may do that - but it's also tracking information about your browsing and sending it to a central source. Be suspicious of things offered for free or that are "advertising supported". Not all of these are bad (Ad-Aware basic for instance is free and installs no tracking or advertising software, as is Zone-Alarm). But you should exercise caution when installing and find a way to check for whether ad software was installed unbeknownst to you.
We've found that the program Ad-Aware from Lavasoft can help purge your computer of these pop-up advertisement and habit tracking gizmos, as well as clean tracking cookies and registry entries off your machine. The program is available for free from www.lavasoft.nu . The free, downloadable version features manual operation (you have to manually perform scans of your system) and will detect and eliminate a huge number of ad programs and cookies. The plus version costs $40 per machine you install it on and adds, among other features, realtime protection. The professional version allows you to scan other computers on your local area network, and customize the scanning process, as well as examine the contents of the information that is tracked in your cookies. Please note that this program is NOT a traditional web page pop-up stopper. This program will find running processes on your system that are popping up advertisements, and purge cookies. Normal pop-ups that are run from Javascript in a client side browser are not suppressed, nor - in the basic version - are new cookies prevented from being created on your machine.
We've also found the prevalence of these infected machines to be higher where kids have access to them. Kids are becoming more and more sophisticated, downloading and installing software found "For free" on the web, and surfing onto sites designed for kids to run online games. Many of these sites contain hidden software designed to co-opt your machine. It's your responsibility to teach your kids safe surfing habits, and show them how to run a program like Ad-aware on their systems to clean up any items left behind. You should also show them how to detect if their anti-virus is running and up to date.
What should you do?
Be suspicious of all "ad supported" free software, and ActiveX controls being downloaded to your computer. Be sure you know what you're getting when you install new software or controls. Run Ad-Aware periodically to purge your system, or add the realtime protection for constant monitoring.
Be especially careful with machines that children have access to on a regular basis. Kids will almost always just click "yes" when a dialog box pops up - installing something you didn't want. If you're using Windows XP Home or Pro you can help avoid this by making your kid's logons those of "normal users" and reserve administrative users for only when you wish to install software. Be sure to logout and to password protect your administrative users if you do this.
If you download Ad-Aware, be sure to run the "Check for Updates now" option before performing your scan. A scan can take as long as a typical virus scan takes, and when you are done it will almost certainly have found some cookies and registry entries on your system. In most cases you can safely quarantine these files. Should you accidentally quarantine something that you didn't mean to Ad-Aware maintains an archive of these files that you can restore from.
Note that disabling advertising software can somtimes also disable the software that you got for "Free". Our advise is - buy the software to get rid of the advertising if it's important to you, and uninstall it if it is not.
If you still are getting a large number of pop-ups, no matter what site you surf onto, have a professional analyze your system to determine the offending program and terminate it.
Keep good, up to date virus signatures, and be sure your virus software is updating.
Run a program such as Zone-Alarm to prevent programs from running on your machine and accessing the internet without your knowledge
For more information:
http://www.lavasoft.nu
Lee Drake
Aztek Computer Solutions, Inc.
After July 31st - 274 N. Goodman St Suite B269
39 N. Goodman St.
Rochester, NY 14607
the human side of computing
Email: ldrake@azcomputer.net
Web: www.azcomputer.net Office Phone: 585-242-2060
Fax number: 585-242-9441
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