Press release June 27, 2002

New Generation of Automatic Dialers
SaferSurf users were protected within 1 hour

The online service www.dialerhilfe.de has found a new generation of dialers. The new dialer that is offered at http://live.sex-explorer.com is controlled completely via an ordinary internet page. This dialer is not transmitted as usual as an executable program, but saved on the target PC as a library containing the necessary functions. Afterwards the embedded scripts start the controls and dial the expensive service numbers in a normal HTML page using 'Active Scripting'.

In order to make sure that the user does not notice anything, the program library is transmitted via an ActiveX control. To make matters worse for the protection programs, the transmission is done in a packed file.

"Protection programs on a computer are totally powerless against this kind of dialers. As the offer of the Sex-Explorer shows, the dialer problem now makes its way to an international level. The protection against 0190 numbers will not be enough in the future", Mr Heiko Rittelmeier, provider of the online service www.dialerhilfe.de, describes the new problem.

The dialer protection of SaferSurf was able to identify the new form within 1 hour. SaferSurf wraps every automatic dialer and other executable Windows programs in a protective layer. This protective layer sends a warning when dialers are loaded from the internet, even if the dialer was supposed to install itself automatically via ActiveX. The user can stop the installation process and delete the program.

"We have extended SaferSurf to recognize certain dangerous ActiveX controls and to block them completely. This way we take away the dialer's basis for existence. Instead of the dangerous dialer the user gets a warning message", says René Holzer, CEO of Nutzwerk and inventor of the real-time data filter SaferSurf.

With SaferSurf the Nutzwerk company provides internet users with a new kind of service for protection against viruses, dialers and unwanted advertisements. SaferSurf checks all incoming data in real-time and only passes on "clean" bits and bytes. SaferSurf automatically takes care of the updates. There is an automatic setup for the Internet Explorer and the eMail program Outlook.

"We wonder what the dialer programmers are thinking of next. As SaferSurf resides outside the user computer and works centrally, all SaferSurf users are protected automatically. If a new virus or malware appears, we usually have a countermeasure within a few minutes", continues Holzer.