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Russian Firm Pays to Infect PCs with Adware
Jaidev writes "Information week is reporting that a Russian site (IframeDollars) is paying web developers 6 cents for each machine they infect with spyware or adware. One security expert estimates that iframeDollars could collect as much as $75,000 annually from the adware it placed on the infected machines during the third week of May, which cost approximately $12,000 in payments to place"
# Everyone is welcome to join the iframeDOLLARS.biz partnership program
# Earn $0.055 ($55.00/1000 installs) and more for each unique iframe installs
# You only put the short one line iframe code on your page(s) and start to MAKE MONEY
# WITHOUT any Active-X console or any pop-ups...It means that you will not lose your unique visitors with our iframe!
# The best percentage of installs (10-40% from the total traff or it's $4-$15 FOR 1000 UNIQUE VISITORS)
# DAILY updated soft
# We have 3 reliable servers with excellent speed
# Payments every Tuesday
# Real-time statictic of your work
# Payment via: Fethard, Webmoney, Wire and E-gold
# More than 150 webmasters work with us
# Friendly support service
# Everybody who works with us is satisfied.
Does this "everybody" include the people whos pcs get infected with this shit? How long before this becomes more widely known or more common place... and will joe public do anything or care? no. The only chance we have is when the next windows "more money, better computer needed edition" comes out..
This is the kind of thing that should be illegal. I mean, it's just blatantly...evil *puts on flame retardant suit* (as for mispellings, I've been up for 45 hours). When are people just going to all in all make these things illegal? (and no I don't mean some crappy worthless legislation, I mean a point where if adware/spyware is what your company profits from, youre done, DONE). There has to be SOME common sense...come on...please? People have to stand up and give these companies the big middle finger. I'm a libertarian, I believe in free market, but I really really hate worthless parasites.
I say this because just last week I helped a friend set up his new HP machine, and noticed that it came bundled with 30 day trials of Norton firewall/AV, some anti-adware, and some antispyware. I replaced all three with free/OS versions. But many users don't know about this, don't know where to get it, and don't know how to use them. In fact, removal of these 'trials' was a pain, even for me.
KOA
Anchorage, Alaska Will Host National Policy Meeting on Technology
The going rate for a US computer is more like 15 to 20 cents. Other countries go for as little as 1 or 2 cents. Cash4Toolbar is installing its stuff through some blogspot.com blogs (IE users beware) and some really cute social engineering, but several others are seeding infected files on BitTorrent.
As a tech support agent that works to remove this crap from the machines of those brave enough to call me, I have to hate these bastards with a virulence that borders on psychotic.
But I also have to thank them for the job security, afer all if they did not do this I would be uneeded and would have to go get a real job.
Talking to Geeks is like eating jello with a chainsaw, interesting, but painful.
So what we need is a "honeypot browser," that represents itself to a website as an old, unpatched copy of IE--but doesn't actually install the spyware. Then we could log in over and over, costing the spyware company money each time.
It wouldn't work - even if you removed one company, others would appear.
How about hitting stupid users over the head repeatedly until they click the 'install critical updates' button...
Then impose heavy fines on the companies that create security-hole-ridden software and charge extortionate amounts to upgrade, despite that the software is a necessary component of most people's systems. They should be forced to provide free security patches for the entire lifetime of the product, or else a free upgrade to the next version.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Why don't we just take this to the next level and have us Slashdotters patrol the web like ants.. Any time there's a verified site doing crap like this, we all hack it, bring it down, track the people involved, torture them, kill them, donate their bodies to science, take their money, and donate it to open source-related initiatives?
And, we'll have it be anonymous.. so we'll see threads like 'Anonymous Cowerd +5 Informative: Ya, found the bastard and poured gasoline all over him and lit him on fire. He should be dead by now.'
--- We need more Ron Paul!
I think you've touched on an interesting point worth exploring further. The complexity of these systems makes it difficult to figure out what's legal and what's not legal, leaving a big grey area. Much Adware and Spyware presents the user with a dialog box:
[ lots of fine print nobody reads ]
[ OK? ]
So technically, the user agreed to get pop-up ads for penis enlargement and mortgage refinancing and downloading all the trojan spyware buddies and I don't know what else because I don't run a Windows computer.
There are quite a few exploitative industries, and they pre-date the complexity of home computing and Windows and Adware and Spyware.
Rent to own? Circumvented credit laws allowing the company to, in effect, charge higher than legal interest rates to low-income consumers.
Televangelism? Exploited the home bound and lonely and sick by showing them television of people (pretending to be) healed. This was the pioneer for staged "Reality" television, and frankly I'm surprised that it took so long (decades) for the television industry to apply the basic business model to popular television (cheap to produce, add some "Scripted Assisted Reality" drama, advertise, and whammo! Dollars flow in without exploiting the poor and the sick.
The modern credit card and mortgage industries present even more complex examples. They have successfully lobbied themselves into a position where the laws are extraordinarily complex, and allow them to perform all manner of exploitative business practices that are perfectly legal. Bought a house lately? Do you have *any* idea who really paid how much for what in that stack of papers?
None of this requires exploiting the complexity of home computers. In fact, in a sense one might consider the wild west nature of marketing via spyware on the home computer to be inspired by these other industries, which pre-date these companies by decades.
One last wild hare thought... Adware and Spyware are also great equalizers, in the same way as the dot com types viewed the internet. This massive market of insecure home systems based on Windows allows *anyone* to get into a money making business with very little overhead.
One could ask the rhetorical question: why is it OK for established multi-billion dollar per year industries to first create and then exploit legal complexity, but it's not OK for budding entrepreneurs in economically disadvantaged nations to set up an, ahem, advertising company.
Work from home! Watch the $$$ roll in!!!
Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler. -- Albert Einstein
And when your car has recall-worthy defects several times a week, it's your responsibility to scan the newspapers for the alert notices. And spend several hours a week in your mechanic's garage, while they fix them with you. It's all OK, because it's on the automaker's tab, right?
--
make install -not war
Aside from the fact that he can't spell worth spit, and as much as I want to flame the crap out of that AC, he does have a point. Now before you all start to flame me, I am a die hard gentoo user, a recent convert from MS Windoze. I switched due to the reasons in this article (spyware/adware). Now to my point. Yes Microsoft should have done better, but the fact is they don't care. As long as they keep putting out a new OS, and removing backwards capability and "legacy" features from the newer versions, the general public will eat it up. I am not a m$ fan at any level, but to make jokes about how a BSD or Linux box is unaffected, while its true, is somewhat misguided IMO. I have recently been doing some research on the topic, and I have found that ANY OS is vulnerable. If a person wants to go to a website, and it requires they install an activex control, no matter what you teach them they will click "ok". Anyone here who has ever had to teach their (grand)parents how to use a computer will know what I am talking about. So is it FUD to thank MS for building a platform that we can all profit from? Me personally, I hope they stick around for a while, fixing their mistakes is my bread and butter. Logically one could assume that if/when linux becomes as main stream as m$, it will be under attack in much the same way m$ is now. I feel it should be noted that OSS is not as safe as some people would like to think it is. I installed Firefox on my grandparents computer, and within a week, I found that "MyWebSearch" has apparently written a toolbar for Firefox!! Which is also notably difficult to get rid of.