No Honor Among Malware Purveyors

metalion writes "True to the saying 'no honor among thieves,' adware company, Avenue Media, is finding that competing adware company, DirectRevenue, is detecting and deleting their software. Now Avenue Media is crying foul and have filed a lawsuit against DirectRevenue stating that DirectRevenue 'knowingly and with intent to defraud, exceeded its authorized access to users' computers.' DirectRevenue acknowledges that it may uninstall competing applications in its user license agreement. A researcher at Harvard University, Ben Edelman, reasons that 'Once the computer is infected with 10 different unwanted programs, the person is likely to take some action to address the situation.' Just how far will adware companies go to continue to attempt to bombard us with their ads?"

Comments

Spyware filing a lawsuit?

[CrazyJim1]

Reminds me of the stories of people calling the police because someone stole their weed.

a pit

[gotem]

great idea, put all the malware to fight, and the survivor gets to be deleted by spybot.
More fun than core wars

Mr. Kettle's comments upon Mr. Pot's reflectivitiy

[wowbagger]

...knowingly and with intent to defraud, exceeded its authorized access to users' computers.

Mr. Kettle, a question upon your comments about Mr. Pot's absense of reflectivity to EM radiation between 680nm and 430nm....

Really, doesn't ALL adware exceed authorize access to user's computers?

Cool!

[MillionthMonkey]

We may be witnessing the establishment of an entirely new biome with its own form of species and evolution.

What spyware writers need to do now is add the following features to their code:

• Random mutations
• Breeding and crossover with other spyware programs so that chunks of similar malicious code are exchanged
• A fitness evaluation function

The fitness evaluation should take into account:

• A penalty for network infrastructure damage
• Number of competing spyware programs "eaten" by an individual
• Number of idiots knocked off the Internet