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

Sometimes we forget.

[jellomizer]

That the people who makes IT Guys lives difficult and annoying are indeed IT guys.

Re:Sometimes we forget.

[Anonymous Coward]

Im pretty sure that the majority of cops that became criminals were the hardest to catch. They know all the tricks and what other cops/detectives will be looking for.

Re:Sometimes we forget.

[fph il quozientatore]

[Sometimes we forget t]hat the people who makes IT Guys lives difficult and annoying are indeed IT guys.

Or lawyers.

Re:Sometimes we forget.

[snl2587]

Difficult? Maybe, but for freelancers who collect a check every time they "fix" an infected computer (read: fiddle around for a while and ultimately end up reinstalling Windows), these crapware authors are the reason they can stay in business.

Re:Sometimes we forget.

[Opportunist]

Without malware writers, I'd be down a few 1000 bucks and would have to do something meaningful.

Still, you may believe me when I tell you, I'd really prefer to write software people want to have to writing software people hate to have but grudgingly accept as a necessary evil.

Re:Sometimes we forget.

[Holi]

if all you end up doing is reinstalling windows then maybe you should be in a different line of work.

Re:Sometimes we forget.

[SpaceLifeForm]

Add clearcmos, reflash BIOS, zero out the entire drive, then reformat, reinstall, and you should be clean.

Until the user screws up again.

Most of the battle is educating the users how to keep themselves clean.

Re:Sometimes we forget.

[bensafrickingenius]

"if all you end up doing is reinstalling windows then maybe you should be in a different line of work."

Hello, I understand you have a pretty serious malware problem. Well, here are your choices: I can spend 10 hours researching all of the hundreds of different problems you have, and fix them, and maybe I'll find them all, and maybe your computer will run ok for a while after that. Of course, if I do miss something, it's your financial information that gets stolen, not mine. That'll run you $300. Or I can just back up your data, format your hard drive, reinstall Windows, secure it in its virgin state, restore your data, and have you back up and running in half the time. For half the money. Oh, and when *I'm* done with your computer, it will run faster and more reliably than the day you bought it. What would you prefer?

And, please, don't give me the "you must not be very good at what you do if you can't make a 5 year old install of windows work better than a sparkling clean one in 20 minutes" line. Your arrogance is making my eyes water.

Re:Sometimes we forget.

[DiLLeMaN]

Please tell me you're not being serious.

Re:Sometimes we forget.

[symbolset]

Typically, yes, cleaning a virus infection from a windows computer costs more billable time than the replacement computer costs. I see a bunch of contrary responses, but I'm guessing they just don't know what's going on here.

Unfortunately, the cost of replacing the machine is just the beginning. After you have the new machine, the crudware infestation it comes with must be removed and that's often a wipe and reinstall from Microsoft media anyway. Then the broken OEM drivers have to be replaced with the functional OEM drivers from the vendor's website, and the installers for those don't always work properly. Then you have to add the drivers for add-on equipment like that combo scanner/fax/printer that the drivers never quite worked for and was discontinued years ago. Then you have to find all the user data from the old machine and put it on the new machine, even the user data that's hidden in stupid places like the programs folder for the application. You'll need to install the third party antivirus, all the Windows updates, and the usual suspects: Flash, Acrobat Reader, an office suite. Then it's all got to be tested with the end user to make sure they've got everything back they need to get their work done. Then if you're going to avoid doing this again in six months, you should take the precaution of capturing a system image.

Yeah, when you're billing at a reasonable rate the cost of the machine is very little. But still, it's something and when a small business is down because the viruses make their computer unusable it's usually best to fix it now rather than wait on a replacement PC to get the doors open again.

If you're reading this and you're a small business owner your best course is to go to EBay right now and buy another system that's the same model as yours for about $150. Then have your IT guy clone your system to it, take it home and put it in storage. Then when your system goes down, you've got a replacement to swap right in and load your data backups on (you DO make data backups, right?) so you can stay functional while your IT guy makes the dead system back into a spare for you.

Re:Sometimes we forget.

[feepness]

Can we throw away the idea of a "throw away society"?

Re:Sometimes we forget.

[symbolset]

Can we throw away the idea of a "throw away society"?

Yes. Unfortunately the baby that goes out with that bathwater is "growth economy".

I'm for it still, but it would suck for most of you.

I hate it when people venerate/elevate scumbags

[elrous0]

Some serial killer goes and and murders dozens of innocent people; and we reward him with veneration, books written about him, endless press coverage, etc. Scumbags don't deserve our respect, our veneration, or polite treatment.

Re:I hate it when people venerate/elevate scumbags

[dave562]

There seems to be a big stretch between a serial killer and some guy writing malicious code. My primary interest in computers initially involved all sorts of fraud and outright criminality. I now work in IT and have a completely legit lifestyle. Anyone who has any real competency or natural inclination to understand computers will mess with them and figure out how to make them do things outside of the "normal" range.

The article talks about exploiting some incompatabilities between the Win32 and WinNT APIs. If there weren't guys like the subject of the interview, those incompatabilities would remain hidden. It takes mischevious people to come along and exploit the holes so that they get patched. By its very nature, software gets better when people push the boundries and tweak it. The person who writes code that leads to improvements in the most widely used operating system is not the same as the person who kills a bunch of people.

If anything, Microsoft made the mistake of making the computer too friendly. They released technologies that gave people too many options. In any sort of free environment, there will be people who abuse the freedoms that they are presented with. Malware authors are those kinds of people. It is easy to blame Microsoft for looking into the future and envisioning a world where web browsers are the central application on the computer. They rushed blindly into it and unleased things like ActiveX on the world. At the core, their intention was right.. they wanted to make it easy to execute code in a distributed environment like the internet. Yet the implementation sucked and it seems like they didn't pay any attention to security.

Re:I hate it when people venerate/elevate scumbags

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn right, dave. However, it's hard to deny that someone who writes malicious code that directly targets (ignorant) consumers may very well be treading on morally bankrupt territory.

Re:I hate it when people venerate/elevate scumbags

[girlintraining]

Some serial killer goes and and murders dozens of innocent people; and we reward him with veneration, books written about him, endless press coverage, etc. Scumbags don't deserve our respect, our veneration, or polite treatment.

We're not here to discuss his moral infirmities. We're here to discuss effective ways of countering the threat the aforementioned poses. It is logical to begin by questioning those we've found engaged in such behaviors as to their motivations, goals, and methods. However, if you do not wish to dissect the frog due to moral outrage, I can give you some music to listen to but you will not pass the course.

Re:I hate it when people venerate/elevate scumbags

[try_anything]

Anyone who has any real competency or natural inclination to understand computers will mess with them and figure out how to make them do things outside of the "normal" range.

"Normal?" Not "honest" or "right" or "non-dickish?" Do you really have the balls to suggest there is some kind of honest difference of opinion about the morality of what these adware guys do?

As for what you did, we all have our shameful moments in life. We all, at some point in our lives, invented and couldn't resist using the really clever way to make fun of the retarded kid or the weak kid in class that nobody liked. We did it to show off, to take out our frustrated aggression, and to temporarily feel better than somebody else. It's called being a childish asshole and it isn't any different from a big kid beating up smaller kids because he hates his life and is desperate for any triumph, no matter how hateful it makes him feel.

By its very nature, software gets better when people push the boundries and tweak it. The person who writes code that leads to improvements in the most widely used operating system is not the same as the person who kills a bunch of people.

Bigger problems get more attention. The more people exploit a flaw, the bigger a problem it is. So yeah, if you go around making problems worse, they'll get patched faster. Childish, egocentric hackers use that logic to rationalize the havoc they cause. People with an honest desire to protect users act in a very different way. The difference is instructive.

Re:I hate it when people venerate/elevate scumbags

[Grishnakh]

So if I buy a door that happens to have a lock with a flaw, it's the fault of the lock maker that my stuff gets stolen? Sorry, but no, the fault lies solely on the shoulders of the thief. Windows has many problems, but all the fault for exploiting it is on the malware authors.

I disagree.

If you buy a door that has a lock with a flaw, and the lock maker knows about this flaw and does nothing about it and continues to sell this same flawed model for many years, making billions of dollars of profit, while people like you keep getting your stuff stolen, there's two parties at fault: 1) the thieves, obviously, since they stole the stuff, and 2) the lock maker, because they sold you something they claimed to be secure and which would protect your stuff from thieves, but which really wasn't, and they knew about it.

When assigning blame for things like this, you have to look at the big picture. For a single instance of criminality, it's usually just the criminal's fault. But when the criminals keep using the same tricks over and over to commit their crimes, you have to look at what's enabling them. In the case of MS, they shoulder a lot of blame, because they, for decades, have put features ahead of security, even though they own the lion's share of the market and any security flaw has the most potential for damage because of that. Finally, because users have known about MS's crap and keep buying it, users also share part of the blame, for continuing to purchase MS's shoddy products, although this is mitigated partially because of MS's manipulation of the market to keep themselves in a position where it's difficult to get by without their product (for instance, because many important software products like AutoCAD only work in Windows).

Chilling

[bbbaldie]

I am now more convinced than ever that it is impossible to secure Windows.

Re:Chilling

[El Lobo]

The same guy says in another interview in CNET that it would be pretty easy to find ways to implement the same in OSX (where they are actually experimenting) and in many Linux distros, but nobody pays a shit for that. They can get a lot of cash for pressing their brains to find exploits for hundred of millions of computers than what they would get to find exploits for some thousands in more exotic OSs. Easy like that. A so complex thing like a OS with millions of lines of code will necessarily ALWAYS have a couple of thousand possible holes, be it BeOS, MistOs, NetBSD os whatever. You only need the will (or the cash).

Re:Chilling

[nwssa]

there isn't much stopping anyone from implementing this on Linux except the payoff is a fraction. Do you go to work for 1/20th of your hourly wage?

Re:Chilling

[steelfood]

In life, genetic diversity means the species has a better chance of survival. OS diversity, processor, and even instruction set diversity, is important for the same ends.

So it's not worth much to attack Linux or OSX or one of the BSD's. If all of these OS's including Windows had the same, 20% marketshare, perhaps it wouldn't be worth it to attack any of them. Or, it might actually be worth it to go for the low hanging fruit, namely, the easier-to-use OS's (OSX, Windows, and possibly a flavor of Linux). But the returns for the amount of work needed to attack 3 or 4 different OS's definitely wouldn't be as high, and the incentive for creating malware would be much less.

Re:Chilling

[vadim_t]

Except that for Linux, the situation is quite different.

First, the OS is open. Which means any user of it can make and submit a patch, which would quickly spread around. Distributions engage in some competition, and the patch would get copied around. There's no need for anybody to wait for a vendor to do it.

Second, there's much less backwards compatibility. If a library function is vulnerable, and fixing is impossible without breaking compatibility, a distribution can find all of the included software that uses it, and fix to work with the new version. You're not going to find libqt 1.0 in a modern distro either.

Third, the open nature of the OS leads to the possibility of patching the OS to mess with the adware, making it report complete crap to the server.

Fourth, there already are generic mechanisms such as SELinux to deal with such things. While they're not that widespread yet, a good attack or two of this sort would do a lot to help adoption.

Re:The new battle ground

[Shados]

Over a third of the API is already depreciated (as far as I can tell), and there is an ever-shifting set of best practices standards. I can only imagine the hell a proper programmer endures in developing truly complex applications for .NET -- all I was doing was a few WMI calls and a database interface and I still crashed the kernel many times trying to figure out what to trap -- in many cases, error handling is mostly about creating a catch-all and then trying to break your code to see what is generated and then guessing what to trap accordingly.

Wow there cowboy... only a very small part of the API is deprecated, the best practices changed a bit once, and only had additions as new features popped, but didn't change much in years... if you crashed the -kernel-, you were using legacy APIs through .NET, not .NET itself, and error handling is very well documented for the most part, and doing a catch all is a (no offense, since .NET is obviously not your primary dev environment) noob way of doing things and is heavily warned against since version 1.

Maybe you fell in the ONE edgecase where it doesn't work well, but 95%+ (probably more) of it works flawlessly, is clearly documented and predictable...even if you go really deep. It becomes a bit more messy when you're interacting with separate products that just happen to have APIs coded in .NET (especially if its not the only language, and thus is probably coded by programmers who have no clue wtf they're doing), and its poorly done... Happens a lot. An example is the SSIS API (thats by Microsoft too), which is in .NET, but was clearly written by C++ gurus...so its a total fucking mess.

Sadly, no.

[lucas_picador]

From the article:

In their licensing terms, the EULA people agree to, they would say "in addition, we get to install any other software we feel like putting on." Of course, nobody reads EULAs, so a lot of people agreed to that. If they had, say, 4 million machines, which was a pretty good sized adware network, they would just go up to every other adware distributor and say "Hey! I've got 4 million machines. Do you want to pay 20 cents a machine? I'll put you on all of them." At the time there was basically no law around this. EULAs were recognized as contracts and all, so that's pretty much how distribution happened.

Um, no. Unconscionability is a pretty ancient principle of contract law. People joke about signing away their first-born child in an unread EULA, but they understand that it's a joke: that term would never be enforced by a court, because allowing contracts of adhesion (like EULAs) signed by non-lawyers in casual circumstances to extract those kinds of concessions from the parties would result in the complete breakdown of society.

So when this guy (and his bosses) talk about how there was "no law around this", they're not fooling anyone, least of all themselves. If I buy a bus ticket and on the back there's some fine print stating that by riding the bus I've agreed to let the driver break into my house and take anything he wants, guess where the bus driver ends up if he tried to exercise his contractual "rights"? In prison. Which is where this guy belongs.

Re:Permanant Midnight

[Hatta]

If you've watched enough Ben Stiller movies to have an opinion on which is the "best", not only do I not trust your opinion, I fear for the health and welfare of you and those around you.

Yes, he is a jerk

[sirwired]

To get that oh-so-useful uninstaller you had to go to a website, answer a survey, and only then could you download it. If they genuinely wanted to make it easy, they would have put it in Add/Remove Programs, and stuck their survey in there.

I don't know about you, but after getting sketchy software on my machine, the LAST thing I want to do is go to some random website and download even MORE crap. I wouldn't trust that download one bit.

And the bit about "it was also designed to be very difficult for other adware to kick off" is complete hand-waving B.S. It was designed to be very difficult for anti-virus packages and anti-spyware packages too. In fact, anti-malware packages were probably the primary target of the persistence code.

And their distributors were complete scum that Direct Revenue did very little to police. Yeah, they suspended any that were complained about (if the hapless users even had any clue how they got the software), but those rogue distributors would just sign up under a new name.

I can't believe he thought this job was a "net positive" simply because he wiped out the other guys' malware more than he installed. That just means he is a very sneaky coder... That's like a embezzeling salesman saying he was a "net positive" because he generated more profits than he stole. It may be true, but it doesn't make him any less of a scumbag.

SirWired

there are comments here threatening violence

[circletimessquare]

so let's educate some of you:

we capture someone like frank abagnale, and we go all sharia law on him, as a lot of you propose, and leave him as a bloody stump

then what?

well, there are other frank abagnales out there. how do we detect them and capture them? well, the frank abagnale you just beat to a pulp: he would have made a good tool to do that, ya think?

luckily, in real life, this is exactly what the feds and the banks did. in real life, you capture and use highly intelligent crooks to... drum roll please... capture more highly intelligent crooks. get it?

law enforcement is hard grinding work, it doesn't happen like "death wish" or "dirty harry". i know in some of your justice league of america fantasy lives, delivering justice with a fist and a gun is the way to go. but we'd like to talk about reality, ok?

so to review:

1. we can have justice your way, and beat adware authors to a pulp, or
2. we can have smart justice, and listen carefully to mr. adware author's words, and use those words to catch more adware authors

get it? see the difference? do you want to pursue justice? or do you want to beat people up?

these are mutually exclusive activities, despite your dimwitted fantasy lives

now go crawl back under your rocks mouth breathers. nobody who is actually going to catch and punish cybercriminals in this world is going to think like you do

even the most vile amoral serial killer is useful to keep alive and listen to. simply for matters of brain analysis and psychological study. or, we could put a bullet in his head, scrambling the abnormal brains, and having nothing useful to catch more vile amoral serial killers

dumb violent justice leaves a dumb violent society that knows nothing about the smart and truly vicious criminals in their midst

smart justice is about studying smart criminals, and using them against each other

The Ethics of CoreWars

[ewhac]

My initial gut reaction was to denounce this guy as a $SCOUNDREL (substitute your preferred profane term). But a little voice told me to go read the article, and now I'm not as sure as I was previously.

Just for fun, consider the following actions a Unitary Programmer might do to your machine. Where would you rate them on the $SCOUNDREL scale, and why?

• Deletes viruses from your machine.
• Deletes competing adware from your machine.
• Rebuffs attempts by competing viruses and adware to be deleted.
• Reconfigures IE to be more secure.
• Reconfigures Outlook to send plaintext only, fixed-width font, no top-posting, do not load or display remote images.
• Disables using MSWord as an email editor.
• Deletes IE; replaces it with Firefox, preserving all your bookmarks.
• Deletes Outlook; replaces it with Thunderbird, converting all your mail archives.
• Deletes all BitTorrent clients; replaces it with a RIAA/MPAA/FBI warning.
• Deletes the scary warning about installing device drivers not digitally signed by Microsoft.
• Converts HDCP to a system security setting, and flags all unprivileged applications that attempt to mess with it.
• Deletes Windows; replaces it with Linux+Wine.
• Deletes Windows; replaces it with Linux+KDE, with a message on the desktop reading, "Learn to use a real computer, kid..."

Playing "CoreWars" is tricky business, and people with even a dim sense of ethics are loathe to try it. But there's one case where none of the above actions are ethically questionable: When the machine's owner does it themselves.

I think the adware author lost sight of that for a while...

Schwab

Re:The new battle ground

[Samah]

If you ask me, Microsoft is complicit in allowing malware to exist because they are unwilling to modernize Windows. They need to start over from scratch on their codebase and have a good hard think about what those APIs and interfaces are going to look like and then stick to it.

And the new version of Windows would be laughed at by non-IT consumers. "Why would I upgrade to the new Windows when all of my stuff doesn't work?" This is part of the argument against Vista, and why some people can't see past the need to break backward compatibility to do things "the right way".

or the cops still on the force...

[SuperBanana]

Im pretty sure that the majority of cops that became criminals were the hardest to catch. They know all the tricks and what other cops/detectives will be looking for.

What about those that use color of law? It's not terribly surprising that the FBI only receives about 200 complaints of color-of-law, and doesn't investigate, much less prosecute, a single one.

Simply being a police officer offers enormous immunity from the general public accusing you of crimes, and further means that most of your fellow officers won't "rat" on you (instead of being disgusted at your behavior and bringing disrepute to the supposed "profession.")

Re:Outsource

[Lotana]

As an Out-sourced IT consultant I don't forget. I thank them.

Everyone wins.

Have a look at broken window fallacy.

Not everyone wins. Just someone else is paying the price

"Ecosystem"???

[DesScorp]

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

What? How in the hell are malware writers an "important part of the ecosystem"?

This is the Internet, not Wild Kingdom. In nature, real virus infections do indeed serve a natural purpose. On a computer, it serves nothing but the ends of assholes and criminals. There's no justification... none whatsoever... for what these guys do. And don't give me that farcical security argument, either. They're not doing the world any favors by violating other people's computers.

"Not evil?"

[Valdrax]

And if you read the interview, you'd see he's not really evil, like many/most/all serial killers, but a very intelligent young person.

First, what exactly is "evil?" Some people think that one has to cackle and twirl your moustache with glee at being evil for its own sake, but most people who do horrible and evil things to other people have a good justification for their acts: "I was desperate and I needed the money," "I was just following orders," "I'm protecting my family and my country," "Everybody else gets away with doing it," "My evil rids the world of other evils," "If I didn't, then someone else would," "It was just a job," "It's nothing personal," "Stupid people get what they deserve," "It's just survival of the fittest," etc., etc.

Doing something wrong just because you were in a tight spot and put your own needs over others is no more just than doing it just because you enjoyed it. Evil is evil. While I feel sympathy for his poverty and think that we as a society should focus our government's attention more on preventing the root causes of crime than just "deterrence," I feel no real qualms about stringing someone up if they've crossed the line. He had a choice whether to do right and struggle or to do wrong and prosper. He chose the easier of the two paths.

And second, I'd like to point out that most serial killers were "very intelligent young people." Unlike them, he wasn't mentally ill -- just greedy, ethically bankrupt, and too enthralled by the shiny programming challenge.

Disposable computers? Can I have them?

[zooblethorpe]

Can you get me in touch with these people you're advising? I could certainly use some free IT equipment.

No really, I'm serious -- if you know of folks throwing out perfectly functional computers solely because of virus infections, I'd love to have a few of their machines. Heck, they're worth something just for hobbyist spare parts, if nothing else. :)

Cheers,