Vulnerability Development mailing list archives
Re: All Advantage Spyware
From: Dimitry Andric <dim () XS4ALL NL>
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 21:00:33 +0200
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 2000-08-10 at 16:03 Thierry wrote:
I have Advpack.dll, Advert.dll, amcompat.tlb and amstream.dll on my system. Though I NEVER installed nor used ALLAdvantage.
Advert.dll is _definitely_ a spyware component, from a company previously called Aureate, and currently called Radiate. Seems like slippery people need to constantly change names to get out of trouble. ;-) This DLL gets installed with a large number of shareware products (see <http://www.radiate.com/advertisers/products.html> for a list), to display banners, and to mine all data that can be gathered from your clickstream, cookies etcetera. Since it is a DLL, it has full access to all data which is available to your user account. The other DLLs you mention have nothing to do with the Advert.dll file, or with Aureate/Radiate. They are from Microsoft: AdvPack.dll - A Microsoft software installation engine component. This comes with Internet Explorer, and is always available in Windows 98 or later. It is used to process .INF files, which are Microsoft setup information files (simple scripts). AMCompat.tlb and AMStream.dll - Components of DirectShow, previously known as "ActiveMovie" (hence the AM-prefix). These 2 files are for backwards compatibility purposes, I believe. If you want to get rid of it, you can just delete it from your system directory, but that might cause applications who rely on it to refuse to work. Those apps mostly suck anyway, so it shouldn't matter much. ;) There's also a reasonably informative page on it at <http://grc.com/optout.htm>. Cheers, - -- Dimitry Andric <dim () xs4all nl> PGP key: http://www.xs4all.nl/~dim/dim.asc KeyID: 4096/1024-0x2E2096A3 Fingerprint: 7AB4 62D2 CE35 FC6D 4239 4FCD B05E A30A 2E20 96A3 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: Encrypted with PGP Plugin for Calypso iQA/AwUBObvMAbBeowouIJajEQK0IQCdFtrVupMqZlIFbC6bdyArqjulp2IAoN64 5SO+LhSHl0vgnLmb2FZeyQ22 =69ug -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Current thread:
- All Advantage Spyware Daehlie Owns (Sep 12)
- Re: All Advantage Spyware Nick Summy (Sep 12)
- Re: All Advantage Spyware Justin Lintz (Sep 12)
- Re: All Advantage Spyware Robert Collins (Sep 12)
- Re: All Advantage Spyware Blue Boar (Sep 12)
- Re: All Advantage Spyware Brad Griffin (Sep 12)
- Re: All Advantage Spyware Thierry (Sep 12)
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- Re: All Advantage Spyware Dimitry Andric (Sep 12)
- How to prevent malicious linking/posting to webapps? Lincoln Yeoh (Sep 12)
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- Re: How to prevent malicious linking/posting to webapps? Lincoln Yeoh (Sep 13)
- Re: How to prevent malicious linking/posting to webapps? Robert Collins (Sep 14)
- Re: How to prevent malicious linking/posting to webapps? Pluto (Sep 13)
- Message not available
- Re: How to prevent malicious linking/posting to webapps? Slawek (Sep 12)
- Re: All Advantage Spyware Russel Smith (Sep 12)
- Re: All Advantage Spyware Jonathan Rickman (Sep 12)
- Re: All Advantage Spyware Brad Griffin (Sep 12)