ElMondoHummus
22nd January 2009, 01:02 PM
Link: http://philosecurity.org/2009/01/12/interview-with-an-adware-author
This Q&A is an interesting interview of a coder who used to work for an adware company. Direct Revenue was sued by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer back in 2006 (http://www.out-law.com/page-6817); the eventual judgement exceeded $1 million. Matt Knox - the adware coder being interviewed - shared some interesting insights on user practices and the act of compromising Windows internally, as well as how easy it is to end up doing things that you would never expect you'd end up doing for a job.
Sample quote:
For a little while, the site through which all their ads ran was something like top 20 in Alexa. Monstrous, really huge traffic. Maybe 4 or 5 months into my tenure there, a virus came out that was disabling some of the machines that we had adware on. I said, “I know enough C that I could kick the virus off the machines,” and I did. They said “Wow, that was really cool. Why don’t you do that again?” Then I started kicking off other viruses, and they said, “That’s pretty cool that you kicked all the viruses off. Why don’t you kick the competitors off, too?”
It was funny. It really showed me the power of gradualism. It’s hard to get people to do something bad all in one big jump, but if you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.
S: Did you feel this was the gently sloping path to Hell?
M: Oh yeah! Absolutely. [ laughs ] I actually believe that if you sum up everything I did it comes out positive, if only because I kicked off an awful lot more adware than I installed.
This Q&A is an interesting interview of a coder who used to work for an adware company. Direct Revenue was sued by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer back in 2006 (http://www.out-law.com/page-6817); the eventual judgement exceeded $1 million. Matt Knox - the adware coder being interviewed - shared some interesting insights on user practices and the act of compromising Windows internally, as well as how easy it is to end up doing things that you would never expect you'd end up doing for a job.
Sample quote:
For a little while, the site through which all their ads ran was something like top 20 in Alexa. Monstrous, really huge traffic. Maybe 4 or 5 months into my tenure there, a virus came out that was disabling some of the machines that we had adware on. I said, “I know enough C that I could kick the virus off the machines,” and I did. They said “Wow, that was really cool. Why don’t you do that again?” Then I started kicking off other viruses, and they said, “That’s pretty cool that you kicked all the viruses off. Why don’t you kick the competitors off, too?”
It was funny. It really showed me the power of gradualism. It’s hard to get people to do something bad all in one big jump, but if you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.
S: Did you feel this was the gently sloping path to Hell?
M: Oh yeah! Absolutely. [ laughs ] I actually believe that if you sum up everything I did it comes out positive, if only because I kicked off an awful lot more adware than I installed.