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

[megamerican]

Some psychopath goes and and murders millions 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.

Leave Henry Kissinger alone!

Re:Seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be a shame if http://mattknox.com/ got Slashdotted, or if someone wrote a script to call his cell phone at all hours of the day and night with "1-900" number advertising.

P. MATTHEW KNOX

matt@mattknox.com

matthewknox@gmail.com

917-355-6517

Here's the adware author's contact information

[Thaelon]

Here's his contact info:
Primary email
Secondary email
Phone number: 917-355-6517

Note: it was incredibly easy to get (2 clicks)