ADWARE

Adware comes in various forms. The most common symptoms of its activity include:

• unwanted advertising matter randomly appearing on your screen
• your browser's home page being "hijacked" to display a page for some commercial service or search engine
• problems connecting to web services which authorise access on the basis of internet IP address

Some free or shareware software (for example the Opera web browser) legitimately displays advertising in a clearly stated way to finance the software's development. However, adware does this in a covert way by installing itself secretly, for example by including itself alongside some other product you are installing, or by enticing you to click on a web-screen image. In some cases, you may unwittingly agree to adware installation in the small print of an on-screen licence agreement when installing a software package.

As well as displaying advertising, adware can also record information about your web-browsing activities and report these to a third party, for example to target the advertising to your interests. Some web browser add-ons, such as the Alexa toolbar, do this.

Not all unwanted screen advertising is a result of Adware. Some web pages produce their own local onscreen pop-ups when you view them. These pop-ups can be irritating but are not produced by an adware infection. They can usually be supressed by a "pop-up stopper" such as the one provided by the Google Toolbar.

Another form of intrusive screen pop-up on Windows PCs makes use of Microsoft's Messenger Services (note that this is different from MSN Instant Messenger) and has Messenger Service in the pop-up title-bar. In earlier versions of Windows, this facility was called WinPopup. For information on disabling Messenger Services or WinPopup see, for example, http://www.opentechsupport.net/forums/archive/topic/11211-1.html