Interview With an Adware Author

rye writes in to recommend a Sherri Davidoff interview with Matt Knox, a talented Ruby instructor and coder, who talks about his early days designing and writing adware for Direct Revenue. (Direct Revenue was sued by Eliot Spitzer in 2006 for surreptitiously installing adware on millions of computers.) "So we've progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each machine, to one that's encrypted — really more just obfuscated — to an executable that doesn't even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads. ... There was one further step that we were going to take but didn't end up doing, and that is we were going to get rid of threads entirely, and just use interrupt handlers. It turns out that in Windows, you can get access to the interrupt handler pretty easily. ... It amounted to a distributed code war on a 4-10 million-node network."

Comments

Re:I hate it when people venerate/elevate scumbags

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

No, I think we are here to talk about this peice of shit of a human. He profits of creating computer cancer. Thats wonderful isnt it folks, oh lets all learn how to do the same or worse...

We will be so proud of ourselves then.

The problem is the market that existed in the first place, and the lengths at which they will go to destroy your computer for their gain. Fuck them all the way, fuck their families and if he has children, i hope his kids hate him for being the peice of shit human that he is.