Ad companies...AAARRRGGHH

[Galen]

It appears that the slugs at ad25.com have found my site. I discovered this quite by accident when one of their adware programs managed to slip past my firewall and local proxy. With the adware installed, my site generates pornographic pop-ups!

Isn't this illegal? I mean, I haven't given anyone permission to use my site for advertiseing (I despise internet ads) and I am most certainly not recieving any money for all this advertising I appear to be giving them.

I blocked the IP of ad25.com from my site, as well as blocking it through my firewall and it didn't stop the pop-ups. Finally, I un-did all the protections against it, visited the site and discovered that they had installed the adware. Removing it fixed the problem. Still, lots of ppl may have this program without realizing it and they'll be getting hit with porn pop-ups from my site!

Do you think there's anything JagPC (or I) can do to block them from my site? Maybe something added to the robots.txt file to prevent their spiders from indexing me?

[jason]

The legality of spyware is one of those touchy ares. As you said, you haven't given anyone permission to advertise on your site, so what they are doing appears to be illegal, BUT they haven't done anything with your site. The ads are being displayed by a program running on your computer. Usually these programs work by scanning web pages that you visit looking for certain keywords. The program then matches those keywords to ads and displays the ad. If iots doing it as a popup/popunder, then it isn't technically interfereing with your site at all, so you really have no legal recourse as the site owner.

On the client side of things you could argue that the spyware vendor illegally installed the software on your computer, but they'll argue against this as well. ASpyware usually gets on your computer in one of two ways: you install software that has the spyware bundled with it or you visit a website that asks you to install it. With the former the program probably has a provision burried deep in its license agreement that says you agree to install the spyware. With the latter you usually have to click OK in a "security warning" box or something similar to install the software. Either way you are legally consenting to having the software on your computer.

Frustrating, eh?

Your best bet is to run a spyware scanner on your computer regularlly to find or remove any spyware that gets on your computer and recommend that others do the same. I recommend AdAware, which you can download at http://www.lavasoftusa.com/.

--Jason

[Galen]

I've run both AdAware and SpyBot S&D several times since this started. I appear to STILL have the program's custom 404 page (full of links and such BS). And my wife is having no end of trouble with her account on this PC.

Oh well. I was just wondering if there were any aggressive scripts to prevent programs like this from working with my site. I'll take care of the spyware/adware problem on my end. Too bad I can't fix it for my visitors though.

[Connie]

I think there is a meta tag you might add to your pages that will prevent at least some of this. Don't know that they will work with all the sypware companies or not. If I can find the tag I will post it.

[jason]

Sometimes you can use JavaScript to test for the presence of the ActiveX components that many these programs install and warn your visitors that they have them installed, but there are so many of them these days that its hard to kepp up.

I've also seen the changed 404 page happen before myself. Sometimes a visit to a remove page on spyware's site can get your old 404 pages restored. That's what we did in one of our computer labs to get our PC's back to normal.

--Jason

[gerilya]

Just recently I had my default page automatically resetting to some coolsearch site every time I opened a new browser window.

That despite the fact that I never allow download/install of any ActiveX components. Just Macromedia flash and few things from Microsoft site.

Nevertheless, that stuff somehow got in. I installed Spybot, but that didn't help. I was so curious about how that happend that I actually checked EXE/DLLs in Windows/system32 directory . After removing xplugin.dll and tmksrvu.exe the problem disappeared. That leaves 2 options:
There is a security hole in IE that allows components to install themselves w/o authorization or I unintentionally allowed it to install itself. I am not sure which one is better, though: the first one is just scary and the second one means I should work less

[Galen]

Yeah, I had the problem with it automatically resetting my home page as well. It's fixed on my end (oh how I do so love the "Repair Windows 2000" option) but I still worry about my visitors. I guess all I can really do is post a warning on the site about this sort of thing and let my visitors know that if they're getting pop-ups from my site it's NOT because of me.

[lookout]

Browser hijackers, ugh. Not at all hard to pick one up without realizing it.

It's worth noting that malware removal tools (like the previously mentioned Adaware) need updating periodically to keep up with the new threats, just like virus protection software.