After Napster stopped allowing our record company's songs to be distributed over their peer-to-peer network, we started looking for alternatives. We stumbled across a program called Kazaa and gave it a try.
Shortly thereafter, we noticed strange things happening on our computer. (For instance, advertisments would pop-up out of nowhere.) Upon further investigation, we learned that others were experiencing similar problems. While reading a music oriented email thread, I saw this entry:
Dear Scott,
You probably installed "HOTText", by a company called Ezula, perhaps as bundled with the Kazaa media-sharing application.See http://www.ezula.com
On further inspection, we found that Ezula software had indeed been installed on our computer. It had been hidden in the Kazaa software installation. It appears as though the Ezula software would be classified as "adware, spyware and malware." Though we can not tell all that the software does, it seems to deliver unsolicited advertisements, track user activity, run mobile code that is a security threat, as well as, other security and privacy violations.
We decided to write Scott asking if he could tell us any more about his experience with Kazaa.
Scott Ross:
www.ezula.com - they attached their client to Kazaa's download - but Kazaa functions as a distributor. Kazaa is a European company. Ezula has a San Francisco phone number on their site.When I objected to what their software did - they told me it was a "Free market economy," and they could do whatever they wanted.
Our conversation on the email list evoked responses from others, too.
Yes, it is evil... even after I uninstalled Kazaa it remained. And, even after I uninstalled it some files were present on my system. I had to clean it out with an "ad virus scanner" called AdAware 5.5.
We took this advice and did our best to remove all parts of Kazaa and Ezula from our computer.