What Is Dialer?

What Is Dialer?
A dialer is a program that uses a computer’s modem to establish a dialup connection to the Internet. A connection is made by dialing a predetermined phone number. Malicious dialers are designed to use international or premium rate local phone numbers to make a connection bypassing the local Internet service provider. Their activity usually results in receiving high phone bills, as per-minute charges of most phone numbers used exceed 5 or 10 dollars.

Most dialers are parasitical programs. They work in the same manner as regular computer viruses and therefore change system’s essential dialup and networking settings without user knowledge and consent.

A typical dialer runs on every computer startup and attempts to hide its presence in the system. Its activity cannot be easily noticed, as a parasite usually doesn’t affect computer performance and doesn’t leave any clues like unexpected advertisements or third-party toolbars. Practically all dialers are designed for commercial purposes.

Their vendors strive to make money out of credulous and unaware users. Parasites deliberately do not offer fast and reliable Internet connection, as every minute that a user spends being online brings them quite a tangible income. A typical dialer’s victim loses hundreds of dollars every day and doesn’t even know about it until he receives an enormous phone bill from a local phone company.

Dialers complicate usual web surfing. Due to very low connection speed and throughput some web sites cannot be accessed or do not work as intended. Downloading software or music, watching online video or animation, browsing complex multimedia sites are almost impossible tasks for users whose computers are infected with dialers.

Moreover, some dialers provide access only to several predetermined web resources, and other sites and servers cannot be accessed at all. As it was said above, most dialers work in the same manner as the computer viruses and therefore can be found and removed with the help of effective antivirus products like Symantec Norton AntiVirus, Kaspersky Anti-Virus, McAfee VirusScan, eTrust EZ Antivirus, Panda Titanium Antivirus, AVG Anti-Virus.

Advanced spyware removers, which are able to scan the system in a similar way antivirus software does and have extensive parasite signature databases can also detect and remove dialers and related components. Powerful anti-spyware solutions such as Microsoft AntiSpyware Beta, Spyware Doctor, Ad-Aware SE, SpyHunter, eTrust PestPatrol or Spybot - Search & Destroy are well-known for perfect dialer detection and removal capabilities.

In some cases even an antivirus or spyware remover can fail to get rid of a particular dialer. That is why there are Internet resources such as 2-Spyware.com, which provide manual malware removal instructions. These instructions allow the user to manually delete all the files, directories, registry entries and other objects that belong to a parasite. However, manual removal requires fair system knowledge and therefore can be a quite difficult and tedious task for novices.

If you are one of the millions of people who have suffered a browser hijacking, you likely know it, and you clearly remember what you were doing when it happened. The best known form of browser hijacking is when a sudden flood of pop-ups, many of them obscene, explode over your screen and you are forced to use the CTRL-ATL-DEL sequence to close your browser and regain control of your computer. Here is a quick guide you can use to identify the different kinds of browser hijackings and how you can rid yourself of them once and for all.
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