Allsum Has Many Names
AllSum is a fairly heavily used Adware program. Only a couple of years old, it has several updates, and uses several aliases, in an attempt to stay well ahead of the antispyware programs that it's "competing" with.
It goes by many aliases, but they’re all the same thing. Whether you call it by the many variations of AllSum (".b," ".c," etc.), or IEHlpr and its variations, or Alexa, or SmartAllYes, it still does the same thing. It’s a Trojan Dropper that hails from China.
Trojan Droppers like AllSum are the most basic form of Adware. These are your pop-up advertisements. These days, they often need assistance from Trojan Downloaders to infect computers and come in bundles.
The way it works is that you download some kind of freeware or otherwise click an infected link on the Internet. This initializes the Trojan Downloader, which will download AllSum and maybe other Adware programs.
Once on your computer, AllSum goes right to work making changes in your computer. It adds registry keys, running processes and tries to inject itself in several of your programs, including your browsers. It also sets itself up to be started whenever your computer starts.
This way, AllSum can give you pop-ups as many times as it can, and it can avoid some conventional spyware removal techniques. While it’s not an inherently dangerous program, it is rather annoying.
The major problem with Adware Dropper programs like AllSum is that they use your resources to annoy you. Any running process on your computer takes memory to run. If you don’t want it to run, it’s a waste of your resources.
The annoyance of AllSum and the other Trojan Droppers is the pop-up advertising. They can bypass pop-up blockers because they’ve immunized themselves against them. These advertisements can be anything, from surveys to adult content. They have no concern for being family friendly.
The pop-ups that AllSum and other Trojan Droppers provide are a severe annoyance. Besides leeching off of your memory, they also directly interfere with your browsing experience. Regularly, while you’re typing something, you get stopped in the middle of a sentence, only to have to shut down the pop-up.
Over time, AllSum and the others can cause some wear and tear on your computer. By this increased load on your memory, it gets harder to run your normal programs. They should definitely be removed from your computer immediately.
AllSum and other forms of Adware are not viruses. There’s a good chance that your antivirus program will not find it. To find it and remove it, you need an antispyware program.
The other route many people take to remove AllSum is to search for manual removal instructions. This is a potentially worse practice than just letting the infection go on. If you don’t follow the directions precisely, and if you don’t have a degree of knowledge on the subject, you could damage your computer. Besides, it doesn’t always work, and you could be given faulty information. Just stick with a spyware removal tool.
About the Author:Carl runs a site devoted to helping you rid your computer from all sorts of spyware and malware at http://www.spyzooka.com/
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Allsum Has Many Names