"Steve Linford, director of The Spamhaus Project, warned on Tuesday that these gangs are supplying US-based spammers with details of compromised PCs that can be used to send out their unsolicited commercial messages, and creating viruses that will create more of these open proxies. "
In other words, this is the source of most of the zombie PCs referenced by the other slashdot article here.
lop.com and keenvalue aka wildmedia. They had morphed since being written about even 2 weeks before(of course I googled), and combined took me 4 hours to eliminate off of a client's Win98 PC. They used every dirty trick in the book to hide and re-install themselves: hidden startup files that rename randomly at each reboot, multiple startup locations, redundancy by installing themselves disguised as several different innocuous sounding programs, including maxmem, maxspeed, ie driver, ie update, People On Page, and more. I finally had to resort to verifying the legitimacy of every single program that was installed, and then manually scan the registry for references to all of the bad stuff. Oh, and by the way, this was after running adaware with the latest updates! (Which I still of course highly recommend, it was just behind on this one.) This stuff used every underhanded trick in the book to keep from being uninstalled. Combined these were far "stickier" than even the worst viruses I have dealt with.
While this software may have been legal, it's methods IMHO should definitely NOT be. I would jump at the chance to join the butt kicking posse going after the sleaze/parasite/spy-ware vermin!
"It's scum like this in my industry that lead to my handle"
Slashdot Mirror
"Steve Linford, director of The Spamhaus Project, warned on Tuesday that these gangs are supplying US-based spammers with details of compromised PCs that can be used to send out their unsolicited commercial messages, and creating viruses that will create more of these open proxies. "
In other words, this is the source of most of the zombie PCs referenced by the other slashdot article here.
They had morphed since being written about even 2 weeks before(of course I googled), and combined took me 4 hours to eliminate off of a client's Win98 PC. They used every dirty trick in the book to hide and re-install themselves: hidden startup files that rename randomly at each reboot, multiple startup locations, redundancy by installing themselves disguised as several different innocuous sounding programs, including maxmem, maxspeed, ie driver, ie update, People On Page, and more. I finally had to resort to verifying the legitimacy of every single program that was installed, and then manually scan the registry for references to all of the bad stuff. Oh, and by the way, this was after running adaware with the latest updates! (Which I still of course highly recommend, it was just behind on this one.) This stuff used every underhanded trick in the book to keep from being uninstalled. Combined these were far "stickier" than even the worst viruses I have dealt with.
While this software may have been legal, it's methods IMHO should definitely NOT be. I would jump at the chance to join the butt kicking posse going after the sleaze/parasite/spy-ware vermin!
"It's scum like this in my industry that lead to my handle"