The other day I downloaded a free program online after I installed it I realized that the program had added several toolbars on my Internet Explorer. One of them was ToPicks, which is simply an advertising toolbar. Who in their right mind would ever want to have an advertising toolbar take up their viewing screen?

First of all I hate advertising, but I know that it is necessary for most types of media. But I believe that my computer is my own personal property and how dare someone put a program on my computer that does nothing but feed me advertising. Not only is it unfair for someone to make me watch unsolicited advertising on my computer, but for the developers to collect money from other companies, makes me never want to buy anything from any company that practices this kind of advertising.

As I said ToPicks is an advertising toolbar that targets Internet Explorer, it gets all of its advertising from a predetermined control server. ToPicks has a seriously potential design flaw that can be exploited by hackers, because ToPicks also silently executes code behind the scenes. Meaning that all a potential hacker has to do is trick the computer into thinking that ToPicks is downloading its code from the control server and the hacker is in with the ability to add more code.

I am not sure if anyone is doing this for sure, but I am pretty sure that it’s just a matter of time. This exploit is a serious problem for people that have ToPicks on their computer. Most software developers that design this kind of adware don’t really care how easy it is to exploit, because there is a segment of software programmer out there that find it funny to develop things like ToPicks.

As someone that understands potential security exploits and adware, if you have something like this on your computer you need to get rid of it now. The best way to do this is with Spyzooka. Spyzooka is not only 100% guaranteed, but it will save you from headaches like ToPicks in the future.