Spyware sinks to another level

Spyware and adware used to be relatively benign things. Sure, they piggybacked on useful software and installed without asking you, then they gathered information about your surfing habits to send back to corporate marketers while constantly

Spyware and adware used to be relatively benign things. Sure, they piggybacked on useful software and installed without asking you, then they gathered information about your surfing habits to send back to corporate marketers while constantly bombarding you with pop-up advertisements for products you neither needed nor wanted, but at least they left your computing resources and data lone.

Along came Kazaa (now owned by Sharman Networks), with its 'Altnet' add-on software. Altnet wasn't really spyware, nor was it adware. Perhaps the best description for Altnet was 'trojan'. The program is capable of connecting your PC to a secondary P2P network, one totally separate from the P2P file-sharing network accessed by Kazaa. This secondary network is owned and controlled by a company called Brilliant Digital Entertainment (BDE). This in itself is bad enough – if you don't know about a connection, you cant control or secure it. If you cant control or secure it, your PC is no longer your own. However, BDE had more in mind than a surreptitious network connection when it had Altnet included with Kazaa's install program. BDE wanted control of all your PC resources – storage, bandwidth and CPU time.

Buried deep within a Terms of Service statement more than 2000 words long, Kazaa advises that Altnet (and by extension, BDE) may utilize 'unused computing power and storage space' on your PC.

Because of where it was buried, Kazaa and BDEs sleight of hand went undiscovered for quite a while – until BDE filed an SEC report that revealed the presence of Altnet within Kazaa software.

Once people started to hear the full story behind what BDE and Sharman Networks had done, they got angry. Guides started appearing on various Websites advising how to remove the BDE trojan manually, as uninstalling the Kazaa client itself failed to remove the Altnet software. Then programs such as Ad-aware from Lavasoft got in on the act, allowing automated BDE removal with one or two clicks of the mouse.

So far, spyware and adware vendors have put up with programs such as Ad-aware, seeing them as a necessary evil to be bypassed every few months via an incremental update of the spyware programs. However, the latest round in the spyware saga takes spyware and adware to a whole new level of insidiousness.

According to this article, the newest version of multimedia player RadLight – which includes various spyware components – has taken to searching for and automatically deleting Ad-aware upon installation.

Until now, the silent deletion or modification of data was solely the province of viruses. For some incomprehensible reason, RadLight thinks that by including a small disclaimer in its ToS on users not being allowed to use Ad-aware, it's somehow okay for the company's program to delete Ad-aware upon detection.

Frankly, this is the worst action by spyware/adware vendors we've ever seen. It could probably be argued that RadLight's actions verge on being illegal. Unfortunately for users, it's probably not cost or time effective for anyone to actually take RadLight to court over the actions of its software. For the time being, we'll have to console ourselves with the fact that Lavasoft is urgently working on a new Reference File for its Ad-aware program, one that will detect the RadLight trojan and give users the option of removing it.