McAfee SiteAdvisor Blog

Are screensavers really a problem?

For a parent, there's nothing quite like watching your monitor morph into a Power Ranger as the screensaver kicks in. Little Jimmy or Janey's been downloading software again! If only it were all fun, games and kung-fu.

We in the technical community are aware that screensaver downloads often come with potentially unwanted programs. Yet typical consumers conduct 15 million searches for screensavers every month. The problem, in our view, is that the screensaver "freebie" often comes with adware strings attached. And it's not just consumers. Major advertisers continue to use adware vendors. Remember the recent episode with Warner Bros. and Zango?

Using SiteAdvisor data, we decided to measure the prevalence of adware distribution on sites distributing screensavers associated with kids TV shows. The results were not pretty.

Kids TV Shows graded by the safety of their screensaver searches

We counted 318 children’s television programs currently airing on English language networks in the United States. We decided to search for screensavers for each of these shows to see how risky it is to put a Rugrat, a Powerpuff Girl or a Flintstone on a desktop.

Each of the three aforementioned programs all returned 50% or more risky sites on Google’s first page of search results. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. A staggering 85% of all kids TV show screensavers searches returned at least one dangerous site on the first page. 20% of all shows returned search results where half or more of the sites were risky. A child or parent who searches for a Gilmore Girl or Kenny the Shark screensaver and clicks randomly on the results has a 60% chance of landing at a risky site.

The Center for Exploited Cartoon Characters

SiteAdvisor rates sites red and yellow for a variety of security threats and annoyances including spyware, viruses, pop-ups, e-mail practices like spam, scams and browser exploits. What follows are the 50 most risky shows to search for, ranked by the percentage of links to red and yellow sites found on the first page of Google search results.

Rank Television Program Risky Sites 1 Power Rangers 81.8% 2 Ren and Stimpy 80.0% Rugrats 80.0% Yogi Bear 80.0% 3 Smurfs 72.7% 4 2 Stupid dogs 70.0% All Grown Up 70.0% Boy Meets World 70.0% Hey Arnold 70.0% Phil Of The Future 70.0% 5 All That 66.7% Pokemon  66.7% Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 66.7% 6 Cow And Chicken 63.7% Kenny The Shark 63.7% Little Bear 63.7% 7 7th Heaven 63.6% 8 Gilmore Girls 61.5% 9 Berenstain Bears 60.0% Cabbage Patch 60.0% Courage The Cowardly Dog 60.0% Full House 60.0% Jack's Music Show 60.0% Josie And The Pussycats 60.0% Justice League 60.0%

Rank Television Program Risky Sites Sabrina the Teenage Witch 60.0% Yu Yu Hakusho 60.0% 10 Mickey Mouse 58.8% 11 Bob The Builder 58.3% 12 Amanda Show 54.6% Croc Files 54.6% Curious George 54.6% Batman: The Animated Series 54.5% Powerpuff Girls 54.5% 13 Dora The Explorer 53.8% 14 Barney 50.0% Bear in the Big Blue House 50.0% Code Lyoko 50.0% Dexter's Laboratory 50.0% Dungeons and Dragons 50.0% Flintstones 50.0% Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends 50.0% Franklin 50.0% Huckleberry Hound 50.0% Jay Jay 50.0% Johnny Bravo 50.0% Kim Possible 50.0% Lilo & Stitch 50.0% One Piece 50.0% Popeye Show 50.0%

The full list can be found here. How unsafe are the screensavers for your child’s favorite TV show?

Go Go Mighty Morphin’ Screensaver Spyware

The Power Rangers franchise is a 13-year old mega-hit that currently airs on various Disney networks like ABC Family and Toon Disney. It’s also this survey’s most risky screensaver search – more than 80% of results link through to risky sites.



One first page “organic” (non-sponsored) link for “Power Rangers Screensavers” leads to starpulse.com (McAfee site analysis), a celebrity Web site that uses screensavers.com (McAfee site analysis) as its desktop theme provider.

Every time a starpulse user installs a program from screensavers.com, starpulse earns an "affiliate" commission. Screensavers.com then earns its own commissions by bundling an adware program called Starware (McAfee program analysis) and a tracking program called Relevant Knowledge (McAfee program analysis).



After we installed Starware, we noticed that the SiteAdvisor plug-in mysteriously vanished from Internet Explorer. Why? It could be intentional, or it could be some kind of toolbar incompatibility. But we’ve tested SiteAdvisor on systems with plenty of other toolbars, and we’ve never seen any other toolbar make our plug-in disappear. We then installed Starware with both SiteAdvisor and Google toolbars in our browser and both disappeared.

SpongeBob SquarePants Soaks Up Red

SpongeBob SquarePants is a highly rated show that airs on Nickelodeon. A crossover hit that also attracts adult watchers, the cartoon sponge starred in his own film in 2004, grossing $140 million internationally. This underwater phenomenon is also popular with adware vendors. Fifty percent of all first page screensaver searches for ‘SpongeBob SquarePants screensaver’ lead to red and yellow rated sites.

The Sketchy Five

appleblossomart.com (McAfee site analysis) is the first organic search result for ‘SpongeBob SquarePants screensaver.’ At first glance, the site appears to offer free desktop themes. Perhaps anticipating users’ skepticism, the site offers a link labeled "click to see why my Screensavers are free". But the resulting page inexplicably offers no information about the site, its business model, or why or whether its screensavers are free. Instead the page merely offers what appears to be a sincere request for donations to groups trying to find a cure for Fibromyalgia.

On the actual download page, Spongebob fans learn that “the first few downloads have advertising software which pay for the file storage and can be easily removed in Add/Remove programs.” It turns out that www.appleblossomart.com is a distributor of adware-bundled screensavers from ezthemes.com (McAfee site anaysis). Five unrelated programs are included with this screensaver.

Potentially Unwanted Program #1:



Potentially Unwanted Program #2:

Potentially Unwanted Program #3:

Potentially Unwanted Program #4:

Potentially Unwanted Program #5:

The Screensaver:

Some adults may take the time to learn about these programs. But children are especially vulnerable to blindly clicking “yes” at each prompt – then the family PC is infected with adware and worse.

Explaining our Report Card

This is our first investigation regarding children’s television TV shows, and some readers may be new to SiteAdvisor’s testing and rating methods. Here’s a brief synopsis:

We establish a Web site's rating by examining a wide variety of information. First, we evaluate a Web site's e-mail practices by signing up with a unique, one-time-use e-mail address and tracking what e-mail arrives at this inbox. Then, we download any files offered by the site and test them for adware, spyware, viruses and more. Next, we inspect the Web site to see if it employs annoying practices such as excessive pop-ups, and we analyze a site's links to find connections with other sites our tests flag as red. We also test sites for so-called "drive by downloads" or breaches of browser security. Finally, we combine our own review with user feedback.

For this survey we collected the titles of 318 kids shows airing on the following networks: ABC Family, Cartoon Network, Discovery, Disney, Fox’s 4Kids TV, Kids WB, the N, NBC, Nick GAS, Nick Jr., Nickelodeon, Nicktoons, Noggin, PBS Kids, TLC, and Toon Disney. We then added the word 'screensaver’ to each title (e.g. 'Dora the explorer screensaver'), and we ran each phrase through Google. We ranked the results by the percentage of first page listings pointing to red or yellow rated sites. We weigh sponsored and natural links equally. (Research indicates that typical users make no distinction between the two types of results.)

We acknowledge some limitations with this survey. We limited our search to Google, and we only checked one page of results. We did not use common Google "hacks" like putting names in quotes to improve accuracy. And we recognize that people use many different keyword combinations in search of the perfect screensaver, combinations that yield safe site percentages both higher and lower than the ones we report today. We ran these names on August 9th, 2006. Because search engine results change frequently, a user searching today using our software is likely to find different results.

That's Not All Folks

The news isn't all bad. The Warner Bros.-Zango episode we mentioned earlier was brought to a succesful conclusion by the power of the Web:

Three months ago, Jimmy Daniels at RealTechNews posted that Warner Bros. was promoting Zango (previously known as 180Solutions) when users requested WB’s kids content. Chet Faliszek of blog Donotreply.com followed up the next day by pointing out that the site’s terms and conditions include the following gem:

“Please note that you may receive Adult-oriented ads…”

Faliszek helpfully suggested that users digg the post. Flash forward 10 weeks. Daniels stumbled on the digg entry. One day and some 5,000 diggs later, Brian Krebs, security columnist for the Washington Post, wrote that Warner Bros. decided to sever its relationship with Zango.

Chris Boyd at Vitalsecurity.org wrote up Zango’s entanglement with Dollavs.com, an avatar site focused on kids. The domain now appears to be parked. And SiteAdvisor advisor Ben Edelman wrote about Zango products delivered via dollidol.com.

SiteAdvisor has written about the complexity of privacy policies of children’s Web sites and the use of free smileys to encourage adware downloads. For what it’s worth, Zango denied that its now-severed Warner Bros.’ relationship had anything to do with kids. In fact, according to their marketing policy: "Zango has a long-standing policy against marketing our software to anyone under the age of 18."

The bottom line: protect your computer from being squashed by an ACME anvil. Install our free McAfee SiteAdvisor browser plug-in, and tell your children that red means no and green means go.