With adware gleaning more user data from people devices than they would normally need too and developers bundle more than one adware framework into their apps, user privacy is increasingly taking a backseat to profit for developers and advertisers. More and more unknown third parties now have access to user browsing history, phone numbers, email address and everything they need to compile comprehensive and ...

Mozilla’s announcement that it will block third-party cookies stirred controversy in the adware industry, raising complaints that halting the practice commonly used to target individual users with tailored ads is “dangerous and highly disturbing”. The decision will result in internet users being spammed by irrelevant ads instead of highly targeted ones, said Dan Jaffe, vice president of government relations...

A new Mac OS X Trojan that injects advertisements in browser has been identified by Bitdefender’s Mac OS X researchers. This piece of malware does not attack the operating system, but rather disguises itself as a plugin for watching web videos to lure unwary victims into downloading, executing and installing a number of browser plugins for Safari, Chrome and Firefox. The infection occurs when the user visit...

Several of the most popular Android apps are skimming users’ phone numbers, e-mail addresses and other data and uploading it to third party servers that belong to companies specialized in advertising to Android users, according to a Bitdefender analysis. Paradise Island, Love Calculator, Samsung TV Media Player are among the popular apps that have adopted this practice, taking sensitive user data and upload...

While the international malware top has barely changed for more than three years, with AutorunInf and Downadup easily dominating the e-threat landscape, malicious operations have reached a turning point in the last three months - older families of e-threats are fading away in the face of newer, more aggressive adware applications. Research in the past three months confirmed an old supposition that malware a...

Remember the old days when your PC was flooded by annoying pop-ups that sprung out of nowhere? That’s the type of aggressive adware that used to plague desktops and eventually caused system-wide errors. In some cases used to disseminate malware, such aggressive adware was a pain to remove and caused a lot of damage. We got so used to seeing ads while surfing the internet or checking our mail that we become ...

Adware – the annoying software most people know to irritate them with distracting ads – is increasingly taken on a more invasive form and often bundled with spyware as creators seek to tap the potential riches of the data harvesting business, according to Bitdefender research. Just like web advertising boosted the amount of user-generated content in the dot-com era, so has it done with software applications...

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Adware, downloading Trojans, e-mailers and, of course, Downadup were all found in Germany...

Highly specialized rootkit driver transforms the users...