I reverse malware from time to time for fun and for work and I can guarantee you that many adware are malware in disguise. They often have the same functionalit

I reverse malware from time to time for fun and for work and I can guarantee you that many adware are malware in disguise. They often have the same functionalities and persistence mechanisms. We're far from the AskToolbar that was showing up in your Internet Explorer over a decade ago. Two variants in particular, known as DealPly and DealAlpha use advanced persistence mechanisms that you'd find in APTs to make themselves nearly impossible to catch and remove. The other risk is the advertising network itself that delivers the advertisement. Exploit kits have been using comprised advertising servers to deliver the exploit and compromise hosts since adware exists. These servers rarely have good security and the companies owning them generally don't care much. I even suspect that some willingly participate in the distribution for financial gain. While doing forensics for a client a few weeks ago, I found what appeared to be a state-sponsored APT being delivered by a program bundled with adware. I'm really upset with open source projects like FileZilla willingly serving bundled crap to its user downloading from the official website to finance itself. They're putting millions of computers at risk.