Inside an Adware Company

Haikster writes "Brad Stone of Newsweek wrote a great article exposing DirectRevenue which is actually a combination of the old Dash guys with IPInsight, abetterinternet, offeroptimizer and blackstonemedia and the others... it's a bit lengthy but a great read."

Comments

Re:Interesting

[OAB_X]

Note: not a cache above, but a pr0n site.

Re:I hate malware.

[hsidhu]

I use the list from remember.mine.nu, its updated regularly and here the line count for my /etc/hosts file.

$ wc -l /etc/hosts
32848 /etc/hosts

I recommend it to anyone and everyone.

Re:When Will AntiVirus remove it?

[wronski]

I use a free crapware blocker (Adaware) and a couple of very simple registry utilities that prevent anyone from setting a registry key without my permission. Not at all bulletproof, but it works for me.

Re:Hosts file + GUIDs

[Lehk228]

Redirect to 0.0.0.0 instead, if you point to 127.0.0.1 you get to wait for every blackholed connection to time out against your own machine, while an attempt to connect to 0.0.0.0 is instantly recognized as an invalid ip and the conneciton fails.

And believe it or not...

[Tuxedo Jack]

Ad-Aware/VX2 Plugin can't get the new VX2 strain. It can't even be removed manually as of yet.

These little bastards are the older brother of CWS, and they've got legitimate backing to do their dirty work.

If you se any HOSTS entries for IEAUTOSEARCH, you're infected - gat Lavasoft's VX2 plugin and hope for the best.