Press release June 25, 2002

Online Services Develop New Protection against Unwanted Dialers
Effective protection against programs that are installed without user knowledge

Lately the misuse of automatic dialers has become one of the biggest problems of the internet. Most dialers are unknowingly installed by the user himself. Often the dialer is offered as an ordinary download link or even installs itself automatically. All this happens without user intervention, usually unnoticed in the background.

The online service www.dialerhilfe.de, provided by Heiko Rittelmeier, has made it his business to warn against the dangers of certain dialers and to educate the users. www.dialerhilfe.de is a project of the interest group Deutsches Internet e.V. (IDI) in Munich, whose objective it is to prevent criminal offences in the internet by means of free user education.

With SaferSurf the Nutzwerk company offers internet users a new kind of service. SaferSurf reliably removes ad banners, viruses and advertisements directly from the data stream. SaferSurf checks all incoming data in real-time and only passes on "clean" bits and bytes. SaferSurf automatically takes care of the updates. Nothing has to be installed. The user registers with SaferSurf and gets his access data. Then he changes the internet browser settings to SaferSurf. Done. There is even an automatic setup for the Internet Explorer and the eMail program Outlook.

Nutzwerk and Mr Rittelmeier have been cooperating for a while now. Mr Rittelmeier has been incorporated as an independent authority on the quality assurance of SaferSurf. Even after a short time they developed the idea to offer a centralized dialer protection.

"Especially unsuspecting users frequently fall victim to unwanted dialers. The installation, configuration and updates of dialer alerts is simply too much for them. The protection has to set in before the dialer is loaded", says Heiko Rittelmeier about the idea for the SaferSurf dialer protection.

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.

"Thanks to the experience of Mr Rittelmeier we succeeded in developing a protection against these damned dialers", says René Holzer, CEO of Nutzwerk and inventor of the real-time data filter SaferSurf. "Now we have a centralised protection that can be set up with 3 mouse clicks. It is the user who decides if a dialer is good or bad. An installation without the knowledge of the user is now impossible", continues Holzer.

Not all dialers are dangerous and are installed without user knowledge. Since SaferSurf does not know if a dialer is loaded on purpose or not, it does not delete automatically all dialers. However, SaferSurf gives you the guarantee that no dialer or other unwanted software is installed and executed without user consent. This protection works in spite of all security vulnerabilities in the operating system and the internet browsers.

The new dialer protection is introduced exclusively at www.dialerhilfe.de. The visitors of the online service can test the protection functionalities for free. After the introduction stage the service can be used by all SaferSurf users.