Foistware is a new term for software that surreptitiously adds hidden components to your system— foisting them on you, on the sly. The term is used to differentiate the kind of sneak-installation done by commercial apps from classic Trojan horse apps, which are usually hacker/cracker products.
Reader John Alvey was the first I’d heard use that term in this note about some "foistware nasties:"
Fred, In the light of your recent discussions of both spyware and Ad-Aware, I want to tell you about my horrific experiences. There are two new nasties around (which some are calling foistware) called Webhancer and NewDotNet. Not only do they put nastyspyware on your PC if you try to remove it by simply deleting it, your winsock will get trashed and you won’t be able to get to the Internet at all. Ad-Aware claims it safely removes these programs but I can assure you that the latest version might safely remove Webhancer but it does not safely remove NewDotNet.
Indeed, when I used As-Aware to remove NewDotNet, I was unable to reconnect to the Internet and even reinstalling Windows did not get me back (I ended up having to uninstall and reinstall Windows). If you do find either on your system, you should uninstall Webhancer using the standard Add/Remove Software feature in Control Panel.. NewDotNet claims the same method will work but others have had problems and alternative methods are offered in the resources below.
NewDotNet seems to come with Earthlink,, @Home, Juno, Webshots and NetZero; Webhancer comes with AudioGalaxy and Bearshare (both post-Napster P2P programs).
Resources:
Webhancer – http://www.cexx.org/webhancer.htm ; http://webhancer.com/support/index.asp?s=32&p=installNewDotNet – http://www.cexx.org/newnet.htm ; http://www.new.net/help_faq.tp#p4
Thanks, John!
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