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:Seriously

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Do you think it would be more of a shame if he accidentally cut his throat while shaving, slipped and fell down three flights of stairs, or tripped and hit his head on a bullet?

Re:I hate it when people venerate/elevate scumbags

[Nos.]

He should be forced to forever use an unpatched Windows (9x, XP, 2000, etc) as his OS on every computer.

Re:I hate it when people venerate/elevate scumbags

[Anonymous Coward]

He should be forced to use Windows ME, at no higher than 800x600 screen mode, with a 56K modem.

He should also be forced to eat his own testicles.

Re:I hate it when people venerate/elevate scumbags

[dylan_-]

Given a choice between the two, I might go with the testicles.

That's the trouble with browsing at +1...now I have to imagine what kind of comment that was a response to...

Re:I hate it when people venerate/elevate scumbags

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should click the "whoosh" button.

Re:I hate it when people venerate/elevate scumbags

[fuckface]

Of course they're morally bankrupt. However they also play an important role in the ecosystem.

OMG, you're right! I'll be over in 20 minutes to smash all your windows. You know, to stimulate the economy!

All these tools are doing is saving M$ money on code audits and proper beta testing at the expense of EVERYONE else.

Yes, law

[Wrexs0ul]

Lol, the only "other" profession where it can take 4 million lines of code and a dozen libraries to effectively state "Hello World".

-Matt