![]() To say it is "our" philosophical definition is also a bit farsical - malware is defined by the corporations that own the anti-malware companies. Conversely, there are very precise definitions for things like a regular expression or a hash table, but malware isn't like that. There is no hard-coded, software-defined definition for malware other than the loose, varying definitions baked into anti-malware programs and services, that are based on our philosophical definition and frequently experience false positives and negatives. The philosophical definition is what is being discussed because at the end of the day that is all we have. Things may have changed since then - these were the pre-Windows 10 days - but if it's anything like this, it's wise to avoid the Unity installer. Only at this point would any actual targeted ads be displayed in the client application's window. This data was stored and referenced if the same user invoked the DLL again at some point. In order to retrieve the latest advertising "offers", the DLL called home with this information over a secure pipe and checked for updates. Once in place, the process would scan the user's computer for specific use patterns (geoinformation MS Office presence what language etc.). This process would run at least as long as the calling process would. The host application unknowingly then used rundll32 to load this copy as a separate (also elevated) process. During initialization, the DLL stored a copy of itself in the user's temp directory. Usually, the only thing the client portion of this DLL needed was a HWND. The way this software worked (as far as I can recall): The installer bundled a DLL from which only a few minor functions were exposed to display offers within the host process. ![]() Since most Windows installers require Administrator privileges, the DLLs that they side-load will inherit these elevated privileges and can scan the user's machine for anything they are interested in. About a decade ago, I briefly worked for a company with the same business model.
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