Zango shuts down

Zango, a company that provided targeted advertising, has closed down. The company had been fined $3m in 2006 for its business practices and courted controversy throughout its existence. Zango was even linked to the Storm botnet by security firm Trend Micro. Much of the controversy centred around the fact the Zango application was often installed onto the PCs of surfers who hadn't wittingly downloaded it. It then caused pop-up advertising to display on PCs while the owners were surfing the web. Zango often denied that its products were 'adware', saying that they were founded on "safe and ethical practices", though several security firms classified it as adware. However, the former chief technical officer of Zango, Ken Smith, admitted that Zango used "aggressive" tactics. "It's a fairly aggressive tactic to pop an ad unexpectedly over somebody's browser session, no matter how targeted. If you're going to get away with it, you need to offer a pretty good value proposition in return. With a few exceptions, Zango was never able to do so," Smith wrote in a blog entry. He also said that the company had picked some bad partners who used less-than-honest means to get the Zango software onto computers. This made it unpopular with nearly everyone who encountered it. "The reason why Zango proved so unpopular with security researchers and computer users around the world was that affiliates frequently silently installed the adware-displaying software onto unsuspecting users' computers by exploiting vulnerabilities," said Graham Cluley of security firm Sophos. Did you have an encounter with Zango? Tell us about it in the Web User forums.