The Plot To Hijack Your Computer – an article

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BusinessWeek has written an interesting article about New York’s lawsuit against Direct Revenue. They have examined court documents and interviewed some people.

Even though pop-up ads maybe is not the greatest threat against safe computing, I think this is an interesting reading to understand how these people work (or do not work).

Oh, and yes, people really didn’t like to have their computers filled with ads. There are some examples of complaints, but bad words are censored, so I think it will be OK to link.

The Plot To Hijack Your Computer

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I had to laugh when I opened the link! Given the topic, it’s “timely” that the article FIRST opens a popup advertising window which you have to close to read the story.

(I won’t start a long winded thing about why I don’t globally block popups…)

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Hi Al,
I’m using Firefox with “Block pop-up” checked, and as a result, as you can imagine I did not see any. In addition, I opened and closed several times as I was re-reading some parts, and think I saw some info that Fx had blocked a pop-up once or twice. Not every time though, little odd.

Anyhow, I can understand that you laughed. The pop-up ads mentioned in the article were a different kind of critter.

I have never really had any big problems with pop-ups, I don’t like them, but I have not seen so many. (Well, it must have been before IE SP2 and my long use of Fx.) Same goes for spam; I think I’ve got 5(!) spam e-mail the last 12-13 years. At the moment, I find that some Computer magazines have some annoying ads that hover above the article text for some seconds, not in a separate window. Guess it’s some flash-thing. Ah, well.

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Argus,
I think pop ups have lost their favor lately as the “irritation of choice” used by a lot of Spam and sales types.
They have moved on to other annoying things. ( or so it seems )

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Bob,
One thing I have hard to understand is when they (AV companies) say that virus/malware writers now have moved from doing it for “fame” to money, spamming computers with ads. OK so they sell ads in several steps and someone do the work to get the on peoples PC’s. However, if all this should work there must be some income generated that gets to the company behind the ads. For the life of me, I cannot see that anyone buys these products,

Stealing personal information and blackmailing people, that’s a completely different thing.

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> At the moment, I find that some Computer magazines have some annoying ads that hover above the article text
> for some seconds, not in a separate window. Guess it’s some flash-thing.

Done with JavaScript. If you use Firefox and the NoScript extension, you can get rid of almost all of these, because almost all of them actually originate from third party ad servers, rather than the site that has the content of interest.

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Jefferson,
Thanks for the info! I have some vague memory of looking at that extension before. I know that I have said before that I did not find any use for extensions … digging … here: post 541,286 but one can always change!

I did some quick tests, and have looked briefly at the settings (“white list” etc.). It worked as you mentioned; ex. went to IDG, allowed http://www.idg, the JavaScript menus now work since I allowed idg, via menu I choose a magazine at the site, gets redirected, and on that page I get a JavaScript ad. The last ad originates from within idg, so I guess one cannot catch them all.

Anyhow, a nice little extension, I will test it.

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