LOP, or Live Online Portal, is malware

Malware

Malware, short for malicious software, consists of programming that is designed to disrupt or deny operation, gather information that leads to loss of privacy or exploitation, or gain unauthorized access to system resources, or that otherwise exhibits abusive behavior...

 that is installed on Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

.

Lop.com is a web site owned by C2Media LTD. It is a pay-per-click

Pay per click

Pay per click is an Internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, where advertisers pay the publisher when the ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market...

 search portal where other websites will pay for each click to their sites via LOP. A method they used to get people to their site was to install a browser hijacker

Browser hijacker

A browser hijacker is a form of malware or spyware that replaces the existing internet browser home page, error page, or search page with its own. These are generally used to force hits to a particular website.- Morwill Search :...

 component on people's computers which would advertise their site through pop-ups

Pop-up ad

Pop-up ads or pop-ups are a form of online advertising on the World Wide Web intended to attract web traffic or capture email addresses. Pop-ups are generally new web browser windows to display advertisements...

. The installer could turn the user's web browser

Web browser

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

 into a device with different links to lop.com.

Older variants of LOP were quite predictable and installed Browser Helper Object

Browser Helper Object

A Browser Helper Object is a DLL module designed as a plugin for Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser to provide added functionality. BHOs were introduced in October 1997 with the release of version 4 of Internet Explorer. Most BHOs are loaded once by each new instance of Internet Explorer...

s and startup entries with known names. Lately, LOP variants have been using random English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 words strung together in a phrase as their executable names and have been placing these executables in the user's application data directory. For example, there are LOP variants which call their file "meal dog house bone.exe".

LOP can usually be easily removed using Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D (as well as various other spyware

Spyware

Spyware is a type of malware that can be installed on computers, and which collects small pieces of information about users without their knowledge. The presence of spyware is typically hidden from the user, and can be difficult to detect. Typically, spyware is secretly installed on the user's...

removal programs).