ADWARE |
| IS SPYWARE AN Internet Nuisance or Public Menace?: Adware is a newly emerging scenario where companies and individuals inject spyware into the computers of the users. There could be the variety of reasons the companies would like to do that. Most of the spyware could be benign and may just generate pop-up ads based on the user's web interests. If the spyware is injected with a malicious motive, the spyware could be injected to track each keystroke of the user and send that information to the owner of this spyware. The information thus obtained could just be used for legitimate data mining or it could be used in the wrong way to obtain credit card or other personal information. The authors here explains the different reasons why the users are unaware of this posing threat. They support their claim by a survey they conducted on IS professionals and students of a large state university in southeastern US. They have tried to evaluate the behavioral tendencies of individuals against adware and advocate user education towards adware.Author: Qing Hu and Tamara Dinev Reference: Communications of the ACM, August 2005.
Investigating Factors Affecting Adoption of Anti Spyware Systems: In the present situation Anti Spyware tools seems to best option to reduce the malicious effects of adware. Despite the growing threat from spyware and adware the number of users adopting Anti spyware tools to control spyware seems to be very low. The authors have researched on the reasons for the low adaptability of Anti Spyware tools and tried to come up with useful guideline of how to improve the adoption rate. Author: Younghwa Lee and Kenneth A. Kozar Reference: Communications of the ACM, August 2005.
Pandora’s Box: spyware, adware, autoexecution, and NGSCB: The author is greatly concerned about the various ways which are being invented to inject adware and spyware into systems of the users to obtain user specific information which is out rightly a breach and abuse of the user's trust. The author poses a question to the vendors of how they could keep silence about such an egregious act of planting parasitic software on user's system while the same vendors are very particular in emphasizing on issues like copyright protection. Author: Dr Eugene Schultz Reference: Elsevier Ltd., 2003
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