Privacy, Security & Virus Information

Don't turn around, Adware is back

As any retired Army general will tell you, there is no better a feeling than seemingly having won a battle in a never ending war. The worst feeling is that whilst you are preparing your army to move on to the next campaign, you discover that the enemy has mounted a counter attack and is coming back at you from territory that you thought was well under your control.

The viral counterattack is coming from that well known enemy, adware it is attacking on the virtually indefensible Facebook and Twitter fronts.

Hackers are using some of the lasts adware to target the easily penetrable defences at all of the popular social networking sites, taking full advantage of their share-friendly environment to spread their evil wares through third-party applications, some of which have been specially created to form a smoke screen.

Hackers never stop scouting their enemy's defences and are versatile enough in their attack strategies to mount a sudden attack where they identify the possibility of a breakthrough. There is no doubt that the sudden swell of adware attacks is as a result of the ever increasing popularity of social networking and sites that invite third-party content.

Adware offerings disguised in third party content cane come in many forms. These have been identified as games, dating apps, videos and media players.

The majority of web surfers remain innocent to the fact that any of these free and friendly "apps" can contain a hidden installation of any type, with the most likely these days to be ad-supported software. Adware is one of the least problematic viruses as it doesn't set out to steal information or destroy files, Instead the software will generate all kinds of advertisements which will pop up without warning and can cause a lot of distress because of the nature of their content.

It is now widely recognized that the war against hackers is not liable to end anytime in the immediate future. This latest round of adware attacks only go to show that vigilance needs to constantly stepped up to prevent infiltration by the enemy. The nearest thing to an iron curtain defence that a computer owner can hope for is to invest in the most powerful and up-to-date antivirus software as well as thinking twice and even three times before downloading any of the hundreds of apps now available and checking out their authenticity thoroughly beforehand.

 

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