Superfish, Delta Homes and JollyWallet were the most popular ad injectors in 2014

According to the latest Google study, in 2014, 5.5% of its users saw malicious ads during their browsing. This is equal to tens of millions of vulnerable uses who might have been involved to such dangerous activities as data theft, hijacked search queries and installed malware.

The additional results of the study, which has also involved the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Barbara, have initiated even more discussions and concerns because what was also revealed on company’s announcement is that 50,870 of Chrome extensions and more than 34,000 of software applications were acting as unwanted ad injectors. This means that they were capable of inserting ads or replacing the existing ones on pages that were visited by users. Beware that it is believed that these numbers of potentially unwanted apps will grow in the future, so the main tip, which can be given to you at the moment of writing, is installing a reputable anti-spyware on your computer and keeping it up-to-date all the time. You should think about that before running into one of these PUPs.

It seems that the most popular adwares that were causing unwanted ads during people’s browsing in 2014 are Superfish and Jollywallet. These programs appeared in 3.9 and 2.4 per cent of Google views. In addition, if you were actively downloading freeware to your computer last year, you may know another potentially unwanted program that was hijacking browsers and injecting ads into people’s search queries. This program is known as Delta Homes. The most interesting thing is that this app has been affecting both, Windows and Mac users. So, it seems that today there is no difference what OS you decide to use.

Why spammers need to inject ads into your search results and mostly visited websites? First of all, by doing so, they get ability to redirect you to affiliate websites and collect the money from advertising. Some part of websites that are promoted with a help of such technique are shopping sites, some part of them has nothing to do with that. In addition, they can also use such ads for collecting personally identifiable and personally non-identifiable information, and then share it with third parties. Finally, they may try to serve you suspicious programs and malware thru these ads.

If you want to stay safe, you should think about installing reputable security software on your computer. If you are using Windows OS, you can download SpyHunter, which has been showing great results when blocking adware and eliminating it from the system. Mac users are highly recommended to try Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus, which is a very powerful and well-designed tool.

About the author
Gabriel E. Hall
Gabriel E. Hall - Passionate web researcher

Gabriel E. Hall is a passionate malware researcher who has been working for 2-spyware for almost a decade.

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