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Alleged Adware Purveyor Indicted
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."
Someone give those guys a free iPod.
So when will Sony be indicted?
Go on - someone make a joke about porn pop-ups, please!
Argh.
Get in 400.000 machines only to earn $60,000
You know, he just *might* have automated the process of getting into each machine...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
By "seize his BMW" I hope they mean "seize his head and put it on a pike in the Internet town square between Google and MSN."
Dance like you're hurt, Love like you need money, and work when somebody's watching.
-Scott Adams
180solutions and Gammacash have put up a show claiming to be the good guys here and helping stop these scurrilous cads . So will there even be an investigation into their affairs.
Perhaps I am a touch cynical , but I very much doubt they had no idea how a lot of their affiliates work . Did they even look into the business they work with , see if they are legitimate . Perhaps they did not know and were just inept , I very much doubt it though .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
400,000 computers and just 60,0000$? Or 60,000$ per month?
The guy ran bots -- he took control of thousands of PCs, and used them for purposes like sending spam.
Taking control of thousands of PCs, is unauthorized use of someone's computer, which is illegal.
That's much worse than Talmudically tricking folks into loading up some Adware (e.g. if you want to run the P2P, you are also agreeing to run our adware bot).
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Why does this always happen to men who work for noble causes?! After all, this chap was just facilitating the distribution of knowledge and information.
Damn him, for buying a car not made by US workers.
15 Cents a computer. $60,000 in a little over one year. With a quick search on Yahoo Jobs, the lowest paying IT security jobs start out at $75,000 with five years of IT experiance. I grant you that he was only 20 and likely didn't have much experiance you could put on a resume, but he likely could have been making $100,000 by the time he was 30 working for the other side without the risk.
Someone save me from this sanity.
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.
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.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Fed1: Let's see, we can go after any one of these 3 guys.
Fed2: What cool stuff do they have?
Fed1: Well, this one guy has a bike and a couple of laptops.The other one has a BMW and a couple of ipods and the other guy a Toyota and a house.
Fed2: Hmm. That's a difficult one. I'd say,lets go after guy number 2 with the BMW and we keep quiet about the ipods and pocket them. In a month it will blow over and my wife can drive the BMW.
Fed1: But I want a bike!
Fed2: Focus pinky!
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
"The feds hope to seize his BMW."
Hopefully they'll seize other things of his that start with the letter 'B'
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Sixty thousand smackeroos, that's the high life all right. After buying the BMW he had gas money for a few weeks.
we will end no whine before its time
Moral of the story, do this when you are 17! Then you get to keep your BMW.
Funnily enough, in Romanian "ancheta" means "investigation".
Gotta love this...
I hope this is the SOB that's been sending me those goddamned "online pharmacy" ads. They're just about the only ones that are getting through my filters, but I'm seeing 5-10 of them every day.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The really sad thing is that this month's Inc magazine posted a list they called the "Inc 500" (wantabe Forbes here) and 180Solutions was among the top time companies (maybe #4 IIRC). They are evil but they're making a lot of money.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
It is hardly as if he was working 9-5 on this 5 days a week. $60,000 for running automated tools to compromise other peoples machines sounds well worth the short amount of time it would take to set up.
In fact there is nothing in the article to indicate that he wasn't working a day job and doing the rest in his spare time.
Maybe so, but there's an important difference between "spending 10+ hours a day commuting/working with a real job" and "spending an hour a week reading reports from your bots".
he likely could have been making $100,000 by the time he was 30 working for the other side without the risk.
It may also be worth considering how much he could have grown his botnet by the time he was 30, or what other (potentially less risky and more lucrative) illegal activities he could have funded with the profits.
A criminal lifestyle operates on a totally different risk:reward ratio to a legitimate one. This guy felt the risk was worth the reward, but it didn't work out for him.
They would have already seized all his property, and even if he was found not guilty, he wouldn't get any of it back.
This guy may very well turn out to be a scumbag, but until a court of law determines him to be a scumbag, I don't think we should be so smug as to cheer for the fed's inalienable right to take whatever it wants from whomever it wants.
Take his car?!! For what he did?!!!
"Hangin's not good enough!
Burnin's not good enough!
He should be torn into itsy, bitsy pieces,
and BURIED ALIVE!!!!!"
Seriously, though... at least a public whipping till he needs hospitalization is in order.
Just 1 comment I ran an xp box for something like 2 years with a permanant connection 2 tha net and generally it didnt get messed up. If these people cant run a firewall, antivirus, patch windows, scan for adware everynow and again then what do they expect. Yes i got a few bits of malware but usually sorted it within about 30 mins. Rant over your probably right. But just consider this if every1 where useing linux boxes then all the malware coders will just start writing for that platform. Just make sure your data and network iz safe then watch the other users crumble.
They fitted George Orwell's coffin with rollers so he could turn over more easily years ago.
is still free and according to TFA even helping the authorities catch their own pushers. So WTF?
Oh well, what the hell...
This reminds me of how some sweatshops would hire lots of illegal aliens to work for them, then after 3 weeks on the day before they were supposed to be paid, the INS would raid the place and deport them all, so as a result the business owner didn't have to pay them anything! And then he'd start over with a fresh crew.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
"If you use our advertising software, you absolutely shall not under any circumstances anyway ever make use of hackbots like the ones at www.hakz0rz.com/180solutions/popuphakz/code to install our software on any computer you do not own without the express consent of the user. The instructions at www.hakz0rz.com/180solutions/popuphakz/howto will tell you exactly what you are absolutely not allowed to do under any circumstances anyway ever, *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*."
Forget the small-timers and go after the real problem.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
....The feds hope to seize his BMW...
Heck, around 2 dozen machines were infected in my government office with that adware vairant. Guess we might be able to claim timeshare on that BMW for the hours they spent cleaning infected machine? I'm hoping for the weekend to Vegas next month.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
The Feds shouldn't be bothering with this kid.
The real problem are the companies running these businesses, not the people "exploiting" a system that was built to be exploited.
180Solutions is trying to portray themselves as a legitimate business by making comments like "we have updated our adware so that the installation click-wrap notification process is presented from our own servers, instead of inside the code where it's vulnerable to tampering".
The consumer is the victim and 180Solutions is the criminal. They are nothing more than system, resource and privacy rapists and should be dealt with as exactly that.
* Si hoc legere scis numium eruditionis habes *
Homer: "This isn't like those other get-rich-quick schemes, Marge. This one's going to make us rich! And quick!"
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
He's going to be sitting in courts for some time with nothing to do but listen to people bitch about him.
I think we need to send him some reading material. Say, numerous catalog's to his home address. Give him something to read during court...
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Do you really believe it is $60K? I'd bet that he hid some of that money. I have a ink spammer whose attorney claims that he is broke, but the discovery that I have examined indicates that he was making between $49k to $70k a month.
Would a spammer lie? Would a botnet owner that works with spammers lie?
Fight Spammers!
CNN also had a story on this: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/11/04/crime. botmaster.reut/index.html
Adware doesn't always require the action of clicking with the mouse. I've had adware attacking me even without clicking on ads. Often cookies are used now to allow the adware to download itself at a set date/time. With more people being perma-connected to the net this is becoming more common. Another example is the dialler program. That just infects random people. I saw this happen to a very good friend of mine. They were surfing their Yahoo mail and they got hit by a dialler. They just find a random IP online and eeny-meeny-miny-mo that one. It's not always the fault of the user. The people who make this are always coming up with new ways to get their crap onto your machine. P.S. I would personally like to get my hands on someone like this and stick their gender in a blender. Then hit the on button and enjoy the Symphony of Sweet Revenge - Movement 1, the screams of the wicked
There have been many times when dealing with people that I wished I could kiss my own butt goodbye