Good or Evil? The Cydoor Debate
Cydoor Desktop Media was
introduced in 1997 by Cydoor Technologies Inc., a leading name in online
advertising. Although users found this
product to be very useful, the Cydoor program established a bad reputation for
displaying constant pop-ups and unwanted advertisements. What made it even more of a menace were
accusations of its ability to act as a browser hijacker and a malicious Trojan
Downloader.
The Cydoor Accusations
Cydoor was known to
collect a user's surfing patterns and redirect their web requests to other
internet locations. The program claimed
a robust amount of space on the user's hard disk and since it came with no
uninstall utility, manually removing it was nearly impossible.
The Cydoor program was
immediately defined as dangerous spyware by several members of the media and
the anti-virus industry. The application
itself was mostly downloaded in conjunction with freeware or sharware, mainly
for the purpose of enabling that program to display advertisements. On the other hand, Cydoor was also downloaded
via compromised sites and installed through vulnerabilities in the Microsoft
Internet Explorer web browser. The
client periodically communicated with the Cydoor server to receive updates,
present new advertisements and report ad ratings. Although personally identifying data wasn't
always transferred, this activity was considered intrusive since several users
didn't agree to the installation of the Cydoor component nor the transmission of
data.
A New Look
Today, Cyboor
Technologies has drastically changed its operation to offer users and affiliate
partners an unintrusive add-supported solution.
The company has since placed a greater emphasis on the visibility of its
End-User License Agreement and clearly defines many elements that were once
privacy concerns. Cydoor have moved
towards providing its partners with a steady source of revenue while assuring
that users are aware of the program's functions.
After the installation of
Cydoor's recent product, the partner application manages numerous
advertisements and tracks their performance.
These ads are served to the user in accordance to predefined impression
and exposure is supposedly not based on any aspect of the user's surfing
patterns or computer behavior.
Occasionally, the partner application communicates with the Cydoor
server to report aggregated performance data regarding which ads were
displayed, the types of impressions they received and if they were clicked on
by users. The company contends that
these performance parameters are similar to those tracked by online
advertisers, such as banners published on a website.
Cydoor representatives
also emphasize that the software does not download any data from the server other
than ad creative content. They stress
that the program only reports standard aggregated campaign parameters related
to ad campaigns. According to their
claims, Cydoor products do not report any other user patterns or transmit
personally identifiable data.
Despite Cydoor's new
outlook on technology, several users are still very cautious of their products,
fearing the threat of intrusive spyware.
While the company has fought to have the malicious title removed from
their programs, many anti-spyware applications will detect any Cyboor program
and flag it as a threat that should be immediately removed from the
system.
