Spywareguide Link-O-Rama Edition
There’s been quite a lot of action going on around here recently, with a fair amount of coverage of some of the things written about. It’s also interesting to note that there’s been something of a resurgence in dubious Adware affiliate activity lately – companies such as Zango (who I’ve written very little about over the past few months) have suddenly come to the fore with what seems like an endless procession of really bizarre behaviour.
That seems as good a place as any to start, so get your bookmarking fingers at the ready and you may find a few articles to pass the time on your lunchbreak with.
August 2008: Adware on Pirate Movie Sites: [1],[2],[3],[4]
This is (of course) related to the large network of websites pushing pirated movie files in return for Zango installs. These sites are still being mapped out, with fresh discoveries all the time. The utterly fake claims with regards what a piece of Adware can do for you is one of the remnants of the old “Adware wars” I can’t say I’m happy about seeing making a comeback.
August 2008: Precocious Phishers Target Teen World: [1]
Logging you into the target site once you’ve been phished is a nifty idea, and from what I’ve seen the person who came up with the idea was a teen himself. There’s a surprise…
August 2008: ASCII Art Spam [1],[2]
Every now and again, peculiar spam tactics emerge and (truth be told) can be fun to work out. The above two links are related to a particular run of ASCII art spam that made a little comeback recently.
September 2008: Webcam hackers shock victims with gay porn [1]
I’ve always had an interest in Memes, but using shock memes to screenshot the victims reaction via webcam is quite the “humorous” tactic. I still love that one guy simply sat there picking his nose while watching one of the shock sites involved though.
September 2008: Fake Batman MMORPG leads to Adware install [1],[2],[3],[4],[5]
This one was particuarly fun to pull apart, as I got to combine two of my favourite things – Batman and videogames. An amazingly brash scam, and you can see more related sites here and here. Curiously, the story had a second wind breathed into it this week, with more coverage on Techdirt and WebProNews. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that Batman is indeed awesome.
September 2008: Fake Twitter Profile Punts Orkut Attack: [1],[2]
There seems to be a little confusion over this, though I’m not entirely sure why – the blog entry clearly references the Malware attack using twitter to promote infection links from a few weeks ago, and this is not the same attack – this one specifically focuses on Orkut users.
Here ends your Link-O-Rama edition of Spywareguide.
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