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Article: Spyware and adware: how do internet users defend themselves?(Report)
- Article from:
- American Journal of Business
- Article date:
- September 22, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 Ball State University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Introduction
If spam is the top pet peeve of Internet users, problems caused by spyware and adware applications represent a close second. Urbach and Kibel (2004) define adware as computer-resident software applications that serve pop-up windows with advertisements that are not related to, or authorized by, the Web sites an individual chooses to visit. These intrusive advertisements can take one of many forms: pop-up or pop-under ads, web banners, redirected web pages, or even spam emails (Sipior and Ward 2008). More recently, some types of adware go even as far as altering browser homepages and adding URLs to bookmarks in order to forcefully direct traffic to a ...