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Intentional SpyWare Infection?

Posted by Cliff on from the a-deliberate-contraction dept.

zagman asks: "I am doing some research on SpyWare / AdWare, and how to prevent/contain the problem, and am looking for some of those 'Bad Sites' - you know, the ones which take advantage of any of the known exploits and installs a whole bunch of software without your knowledge (or sometime with it). I am testing this on IE6 on an XP-SP1 box (no further patches) and also IE6.02 on a XP-SP2 box. Can anyone out there recommend some 'good' bad-sites for me to go? Benjamin Edelman did some similar work, and posted his results, but I also want to compare Mozilla and FireFox's response as well. Thanks out there!" Update: 11/24 4:05pm EDT by C : In case it hasn't been mentioned already, a considerable amount of infection can be obtained from a single website. Any other infectious goodies out there?

3 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. The easiest way... by rritterson · · Score: 5, Informative

    The easiest way is to download something like IESPYAD which puts a whole bunch of domains into the restricted sites zone in IE. Just open the data file and start browsing. You can download it here:

    https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ehowes/www/resource.htm# IESPYAD

    Another alternative is one of the many HOSTS files out there. Unfortunately, many of those also contain sites that serve ads, so you'll have to filter them yourself. Here are a few:

    http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
    http://www.dozleng.com/hpguru/

    --
    -Ryan
    AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
  2. previous report with links by WasteOfAmmo · · Score: 4, Informative
    You may want to look at http://spywarewarrior.com/asw-test-guide.htm (see previous slashdot article. This not only gives a review of various anti-spyware programs but outlines the testing methodology that they used, lists the sites they went to in order to get infected, lists the critical "finger prints" of the infections, and also describes the setup they used.

    Merlin.

  3. VMware by Kizzle · · Score: 4, Informative

    I played around with spyware just for the fun of it on XP. Instead of going through the trouble of trashing a whole computer I installed XP to a virtual machine in VMware. With the original install backed up I was free to experiment as much as I wanted since I could reset it back to normal at any time. Backing up isn't done for you but it's easy enough to just keep a copy of the disk image it creates.

    --
    Hacker Media