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Morpheus Hijacks Browsers For Affiliate Links

Posted by timothy on from the oh-no-this-can't-be-true dept.

An anonymous reader submits: "According to this news.com article, morpheus (aka streamcast) has begun silently installing a browser plugin on its users' machines that basically hijacks the web browser even when not running Morpheus. An afflicted browser will sense if a user is going to visit a shopping site like Yahoo! or Amazon, and secretly send them to a different site instead and then redirect them from this site to the user's intended destination. The user will not be aware that this is happening... however the site doing the redirecting will benefit because they are set up as an affiliate partner and will get a commission on the backs of the user. On a horrible scale of 1 - 10 for sleazy business practices, I rate this a 9. Comments?"

4 of 489 comments (clear)

  1. Great Comments by shogun · · Score: 2, Redundant

    Oh this is promising, I load up this news article and theres a total of 3 comments posted under it, all of which are below my threshold, I assume all of which are first posts. But anyway back on topic.
    I've heard of sneakyness not far off this already. It seems some of the other P2P file sharing programs also like to install sneaky plugins which do things from reporting your every url visited up to popping up windows with ads in them on encoutering certain keywords. Very nasty and can also incur a performance hit.

  2. Nasty performance hit by akh · · Score: 1, Redundant

    I saw this on a co-workers computer yesterday. IE (and the rest of his system) were virtually unresponsive - especially when it came to network operations. Turns out he had just installed Morpheus on it. Grabbed a copy of Ad-aware, ran it, and all his problems went away. Nasty stuff though...

    --
    Accept Eris as your Fnord and personally sate her
  3. Re:It's scumware... by I+Want+GNU! · · Score: 2, Redundant

    And here's a clickable link for the lazy: http://www.scumware.com :-)

  4. Re:Who this really hurts by jgerman · · Score: 2, Redundant

    Insightful my ass. This is an invasion of privacy pure and simple. If it was an integrated browser in the Morpheus client, that's one thing. But if I were to write a virus to do the exact same thing, I'd be prosecuted if I was caught. Why is ok for a corporation to do something that is a criminal act for an individual?

    --
    I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.