Over the years more and more types of malware have formed. However one of the most abundant types of malware, that surprisingly not many people know about happens to be a type of malware known by many smaller communities as “AnnoyWare”.
Now when doing a quick Google search of it, you get prompted links to multiple sites such as this Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagware - that lists AnnoyWare (known as NagWare in the article) as “Nagware (also known as begware, annoyware or a nagscreen) is a type of shareware that persistently reminds (nags) the user to register it by paying a fee. It usually does this by popping up a message when the user starts the program, or intermittently while the user is using the application.”
However there is also another definition that not many people know about, and because of that you will not find listed on many sites. AnnoyWare in this case is known as any type of malware that happens to be AdWare or SpyWare directly or at least related to that type of Malware. You may think, well what’s the difference? We’ll get to just that.
As AdWare and SpyWare have become more and more sophisticated, so has AnnoyWare. However one big difference separating AnnoyWare from other types of malware is that 1) It takes up much more space 2) It is much more passive, although it still gives your information out 3) It targets certain groups - children for example
Of course, it seem that the simple way to not get AnnoyWare would be to not click on any links or just stay off of shady sites. But it’s really not that simple. In a one study researchers just went on multiple child based sites, well known ones at that for no less than 15 min. doing nothing more than just browsing the site (they clicked on no games, or anything like that). Yet after that 15 mins, they had the computer scanned for malware and surprisingly enough in just 15 mins. of just browsing the site they had collected about 20 types of different AdWare, as well as 4 different types of SpyWare.
So now that we’ve seen how bad AnnoyWare can be, there lays one last topic. How to not get it in the first place. Well keep in mind you should already be actively exercising all the well known ways to not get malware, which as an end result will very much lower your chances. However you should also disable things like Adobe Flash, which over time have become increasingly less secure. As well as the fact that you should always go through your large downloads as AnnoyWare seems to always somehow download along with those programs.
Anyways that leaves us to the end of the post! Before you leave, I just wanted to thank you all for reading. As well as remind you that this post has been created to help people know more about AnnoyWare, as well as how to attempt to stop it from getting in. Anyways I hope that this article has helped, and without further ado I wish y’all a great day!
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