Name: Hotbar Category: Adware Advice: Remove Risk: Elevated Risk Elevated threats are usually threats that fall into the range of adware in which data about a user's habits are tracked and sent back to a server for analysis without your consent or knowledge. Signatures: at type: Adware - Adware is generally software that displays advertisements. Some advertisers may covertly install adware on your system and generate a stream of unsolicited advertisements that can clutter your desktop and affect your productivity. The advertisements may also contain pornographic or other material that you might find inappropriate. The extra processing required to track you or to display advertisements can tax your computer and hurt your system performance. Advice: Remove Threat risk: Elevated Risk Elevated threats are usually threats that fall into the range of adware in which data about a user's habits are tracked and sent back to a server for analysis without your consent or knowledge. Description: Hotbar is promoted as an application that adds graphical skins to Internet Explorer toolbars and outlook/ Outlook Express, and also adds its own toolbar. It monitors all URLs you visit to add link buttons to its toolbar dependent on the site you are Hotbar's toolbar installs dynamic buttons on the left-hand side leading to advertisers' and/or paid search sites dependent on the site you are currently viewing as well as the keywords detected on the current site. If Hotbar's toolbar is not removed (form View|Toolbars), it will add buttons on the left-hand side leading to advertisers' sites, often competitors of the site you are visiting. Hotbar works with third party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our web sites and use the Service, including the toolbars. Two of these third parties are DoubleClick and Engage. Such companies may use information about your visits to our and other web sites and use of the Service, including the toolbars, in combination with non-personally identifiable information about your purchases and interests from other online and offline sources, in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. In addition, we share web site usage information about visitors to our web sites and users of the Service, including the toolbars, with such companies for the purpose of managing and targeting advertisements and for market research analysis on our web sites and the Service, including the toolbars. Hotbar and its third-party advertising companies may note some of the pages you visit on our web sites, and through use of the Service, including the toolbars, through the use of pixel tags (also called clear gifs). In the course of serving advertisements, third-party advertisers may place or recognize a unique "cookie" on your computer and, in some cases, collect data through the use of cookies. Hotbar, from time to time, may work with email direct marketers such as Netcreations to offer users the opportunity to subscribe to various email newsletters subscriptions. Hotbar is bundled with older releases of iMesh and other free software, more recently, advertised through junk e-mail purporting to be a Microsoft upgrade to Outlook as well as other email spam methods using a drive by download technology to install itself Type: Adware - Adware is generally software that displays advertisements. Some advertisers may covertly install adware on your system and generate a stream of unsolicited advertisements that can clutter your desktop and affect your productivity. The advertisements may also contain pornographic or other material that you might find inappropriate. The extra processing required to track you or to display advertisements can tax your computer and hurt your system performance.