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Alleged Adware Purveyor Indicted

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the facing-the-music dept.

weeva writes "Wired News reports that federal prosecutors have indicted a 20-year-old California man for installing adware on 400,000 Windows machines he compromised with a variant of RxBot. Jeanson Ancheta allegedly pulled in $60,000 in affiliate fees from porn pop-up company Gammacash, and 180solutions subsidiary ZangoCash. The feds hope to seize his BMW."

5 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. So . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So when will Sony be indicted?

  2. So what happens to the Companies by FidelCatsro · · Score: 4, Insightful

    180solutions and Gammacash have put up a show claiming to be the good guys here and helping stop these scurrilous cads . So will there even be an investigation into their affairs.

    Perhaps I am a touch cynical , but I very much doubt they had no idea how a lot of their affiliates work . Did they even look into the business they work with , see if they are legitimate . Perhaps they did not know and were just inept , I very much doubt it though .

    --
    The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
    1. Re:So what happens to the Companies by meringuoid · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Perhaps they did not know and were just inept , I very much doubt it though .

      They probably did not know, because they did not want to know. Their policy was probably 'ask no questions, get no lies': you don't investigate at all into your affiliates' businesses, and then when the faeces strike the ventilator you can honestly claim ignorance...

      --
      Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
  3. Simple by wehup · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seems like the feds could clean all of this up by launching a quick investigation into *every* affiliate of the spyware/adware companies. The only way an affiliate can get someone to load this junk is by trickery or exploit.

  4. 60,000 for installations only by nietsch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So this guy had the installation hacked up so he didn't need any users permission to install the spyware. Why on earth didn't he also hack the display of the popups so they were shown to /dev/null (or whatever the windows variant is) instead of to the user. The most succesfull virusses are the ones that affect their host the least. Or if it was really only the installations, why not fake the installation?

    Worms/bots/virusses usually try to patch the vulnr they entered with. If they extended this behavior to keep windows fully patched then they could even be beneficial to their victims/hosts. That would increase the chances of survival of the malware even more.

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    This space is intentionally staring blankly at you