Bonzi Buddy: How Did It Work?

Bonzi Buddy was found to have been used as a malicious instrument to steal users’ personal information, as well as force advertisements onto people’s screens unprompted. These viruses are called spyware (spy software).

In Bonzi Buddie’s case, the fun purple gorilla that people would download as a user-friendly helper would be infected with this spyware. When downloaded, Bonzi Buddy would give the user an unprompted pop-up message saying that their IP address was being broadcast. Once the user interacted with the message in any way (including trying to close it), their browser would then be opened and sent to a page full of products to be bought. Obviously, this was a very deceptive and annoying issue for users to deal with.