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I am developing an e-commerce web application, and in that ads from other giants pop up. I figured out that this is done by PriceFountain, which is actually a spyware. I found the steps to remove that from my laptop. more found here. but the problem is my clients can also have this adware. I want to programmatically do following or either of them, on the client side:: (and if it is not possible at least inform the user to do so)

  1. If, PriceFountain is present, uninstall it from their system. If it is an add-on, remove that.

  2. Activate the pop-up blocker (deactivation can be achieved through javascript and jquery). But I want to activate. My site does not need pop-ups.

  3. Alter the registry of user for the contents of PriceFountain.

I know this is somewhat an unethical hack, but can this be achieved and if so, how?

More of that, it is just my curiosity can we affect client site settings.?

inquisitive
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1 Answers1

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You used to be able to do that (with jscript/vbscript) in IE if and only if the user added your site to his trusted sites (and allowed pretty much everywhere there), or if it was the intranet-site with relaxed permissions.

Back in the old day's I had such a thing for the intranet-help-site where users could browse through the faq and click on the 'execute solution' button for the common 'problems' (previously solved and added to DB).

For rather obvious security-reasons this is no longer the case (although one can still pull some stuff in legacy IE environments).

The point is: you can't do this on other browsers then IE (unless maybe you'd develop separate plug-ins for them and ask your users to install something that will essentially give you access to their whole machine). Realize that effectively what you are asking for is a way to fully control the user's machine. Would you install such a browser (on your parents pc)?

The best course of action would be to face-up, inform your users on your main-website (enter-page) that something bad spread throughout an ad-network and guide them through the steps (that you already found) necessary to relieve them from their problem.
Even if what you asked was possible, you'd still need the user's cooperation somewhere along the way, even if you'd were to write an application for this that the users could download and run (administrative/elevated)..

Good Luck!

EDIT: for the registry you might try something with the answers in this question: read/write to Windows Registry using Java

Still, you'd still need the user's co-operation.

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GitaarLAB
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    Thanks for the elucid response. How can I check at the user's site that the mentioned adware comes up? – inquisitive Nov 06 '14 at 06:28
  • I have no idea... (specifically, no idea how it comes up, what makes it come up.. injected code? New Tab/Iframe etc). Then.. we'd fully need to analyze it and see if there is something predictable to hook on to.. Way above my paygrade (in brownie points) `;)` , sorry. I also don't intend to willingly go check that piece of malware out.. – GitaarLAB Nov 06 '14 at 06:33