• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, November 11, 2005

A federal judge has shut down Enternet Media, a California company that allegedly tricked bloggers hosted by Google into distributing adware to visitors. The Federal Trade Commission Thursday said it had filed a lawsuit against Enternet and won a temporary court order against the company.

In a complaint filed in federal district court in California earlier this month, the FTC charged that Enternet and an affiliate, Iwebtunes, offered bloggers free music downloads that came bundled with Enternet code designed to target visitors to the blog.

When visitors landed at the "co-opted blogs," Enternet displayed a prompt inviting them to install a supposed browser upgrade, according to the FTC.

Users who agreed to do so were instead given a program that served frequent pop-up ads and proved extremely hard to remove. Although Enternet had an end-user license agreement, it wasn't readily available and the wording was too "broad and over-reaching" to be informative, according to the FTC's complaint.

Enternet Media is notorious among spyware and adware watchdogs for allegedly distributing SearchMiracle/EliteBar--an application that contains code allowing it to "hide" on users' computers and evade spyware removal programs, said spyware researcher Eric Howes, who runs the site Spyware Warrior.com. "Not even Windows can see that these files are on the hard drive," Howes said. Google earlier this year intervened to stop the spyware distribution by bloggers it hosted.

Last week, Judge Christina Snyder authorized the FTC to raid Enternet's offices to collect information. She also ordered the company to stop serving adware pending a hearing Monday.