If you’re not familiar with the program know as Agloco (http://www.agolco.com) and their history, Agloco is a spinoff of a failed “Paid to Surf” program called AllAdvantage. The premise of the company’s business is that they pay members to surf webpages for a few hours a day using their “toolbar” software. If you have been following the Agloco saga, they had a massive recruitment drive in 2006 yet failed to produce a product (the toolbar) and encouraged members to heavily recruit new members into their downline to earn commissions from those referrals in the future. Almost six months later, Agloco has finally released their toolbar to the anticipation of their members.
I downloaded my copy of the Agloco Toolbar and installed it on one of my old laptops that I use as a backup and is clean of any virus and spyware. My first impression with the Agloco toolbar was not pleasant due to the fact that a “toolbar” should be a “toolbar” and what Agloco has designed is an application that resizes the windows on your desktop to make room for itself and uses Internet Explorer to make calls to webpages whenever a member clicks on a link in the toolbar. I won’t even bother to get into the discussion of why I only use Firefox and I don’t even like Internet Explorer to be booted on my computer, but that was a second really big turnoff for me with the Agloco product.
The big suprise came when I restarted my laptop with Agloco installed and as windows was starting I got a Windows Scripting error and a virus alert from my anti-virus that there were four infected files on my computer. I was extremely suprised to see a virus alert because I rarely ever see thm, especially on my backup laptop where I am not running any mail clients or file sharing apps, not even an mp3 player. I also noticed a swarm of IE link shortcuts on my desktop that said “Free Computer”, “Get Your Free iPhone”, “Free Cruise to the Bahamas”, etc…. Evidently the Agloco software had installed these shortcuts much as you’d see when you buy a new PC. Another strike against Agloco for using that type of marketing strategy embedded in their software.
The real horror began after I allowed the computer to just sit with no applications running except for the Agloco Toolbar. I left the machine alone for about an hour and when I returned, the machine had completely frozen up and there were hundreds of Internet Explorer windows open on the desktop. Considering that IE had not been opened on that particular computer in ages, I knew immediately what piece of software had been recently installed and was causing this problem. I did a hard reboot on the laptop, got through the same virus alerts, and this time I didn’t launch Agloco software, however the Agloco application just minimized itself to the system tray. I hate when applications don’t listen and obey my requests. If I close an application, I want it closed, not minimized to the system tray. Anyway, I decided to let it sit in the system tray and see what happened. Again, after an hour, the desktop was full of IE windows, regardless of the fact the Agloco app was minimized to the toolbar. So, I tried another hard reboot and this time I closed the Agloco application, clicked on the icon in the system tray and closed the application from there and made sure there were no Agloco processes running in the Windows Task Manager, and left the machine for about an hour. To my horror, when I returned, once again the system was loaded with IE windows, mostly to the same sites as the previous times.
I am now in the process of completely removing the Agloco Toolbar from my system and will be testing if there is any residue left behind when the application is uninstalled. If I experience any problems getting rid of this nuisance application, I’ll be sure to write a blog post with instructions on how to completely remove this malware.
I highly recommend anybody reading this who is on the fence about downloading and installing the Agloco Toolbar to stay away from it. It is nothing but spyware, malware and a virus rolled into one.
