Sunday, January 25, 2009

Identifying/Blocking Spyware's/Adbots?

The term "spyware" is a slang which is not well defined. It is commonly used mainly for various adware (and adware is a program that is supported by presenting advertisements to the user), and that during their installation process, they install an independent program which we shall call "adbot". The adbot runs independently even if the hosting adware is not running, and it maintains the advertisements, downloads them from the remote server, and provides information to the remote server. The adbot is usually hidden. There are many companies that offer adbots, and advertisements services to adware. The information that the adbots deliver to their servers from the computer where the adbot is installed, is "how much time each advertisement is shown, which was the hosting adware, and whether the user clicked on the advertisement. This is important so that the advertisements server will be able to know how much money to get from each of the advertised companies, and how much from it to deliver to each of the adware maintainers. Some of the adbots also collect other information in order to better choose the advertisements to the users. The term "spyware" is more generic, but most of the spyware fall into this category. Many types of adbots can be identified and blocked by personal firewalls.

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