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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?
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
Go on - someone make a joke about porn pop-ups, please!
I'd pay for those!
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
$60,000 over the course of one year. As annoying as spam is, it really does not pay well unless done in large amounts. The big catch here was that very little was invested into making that money because other people's computers were doing all of the grunt work.
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.
Not necessarily...consider this, what's worse:
Your wife divorcing you to marry some jerk she met on the internet
or
Your wife divorcing you to marry your best friend.
Point being that, sometimes it's *better* to be fucked over by the man in the black hat, instead of a reputable software company that provides contact information and is only legal because of one sentence burried deep in an EULA...at least thats MHO.
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
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
Bentley?
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.
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.