"To tell the truth ... I'm sorta surprised they haven't caught me yet," The Washington Post ran an interesting interview with a botmaster, a young man who made serveral thousands of dollars a month installing XXX spyware on machines that he controlled. He installed the software on the machines of people he did not know by hacking into them remotely. The lenghty article included a partial photo of the botmaster along with vauge descriptions of the small midwestern town where the man lives, and was published with the understanding that the man's identity would be kept secret.
Someone should have told that to the person that manages photos at the Washington Post. An estute reader over at
Slashdot was able to locate some extra information stored in the picture's metadata including the photographer and the location the picture was taken, Roland, Oklahoma, a town of less than 3000 people. Whoops.
posted by daHIFI
on Feb 21, 2006 -
56 comments
Dale Begg-Smith is being called the "
golden boy of the slopes" by the Australian media after winning gold in the Turin Winter Games. However, when asked about his business, which has reportedly earned him millions of dollars and enabled him to buy a Lamborghini, Begg-Smith became "..vague about its nature." "It's complicated," he said. "We make the technology for companies to monitor their online advertising campaigns."
What is emerging now is that Begg-Smith's companies, AdsCPM and CPM Media, are
linked to home page hijacking, spyware, porn redirectors, and other unsavory internet practices.
A quick
WHOIS of AdsCPM.com reveals that the same IP address is shared with porn domain names and websites that are notorious for distributing spyware.
Bloggers using the Wayback machine have turned up similar information. Is he a willing spyware merchant who has now reluctantly been
bought to our attention, or a legitimate internet entrepreneur?
posted by davem
on Feb 17, 2006 -
39 comments
Brillian Digital has quietly attached its software to Kazaa and plans to remotely "turn on" people’s PCs, welding them into a new network. CEO sez a pop-up box will give people a chance to turn it off. Users who've accept "terms of service" already distributed with Brilliant’s and Kazaa’s software are already agreeing to let their computers be used without any payment at all.
posted by ao4047
on Apr 2, 2002 -
27 comments
Fight back against sneaky scumware like TopText and Surf+, with this Javascript code by Gary Rosenzweig of CleverMedia. The code detects the scumware's presence, pops up a message letting the user know they're carrying a parasite, and then surveys the user to find out if they knew about it. In the first day of operation on his site, he discovered that 3.67% of his visitors had either TopText or Surf+ installed, and more than 90% of these visitors did not know until they were told. (Link to the Javascript code is at the bottom of the article.)
posted by cfj
on Aug 31, 2001 -
7 comments
