NY State Continues Crusades Against Spyware
I have written about NY State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer here, and how he is aggressively targeting companies that made money off of spyware and adware programs. He continues with his campaign to scrape the barnacles off the web’s underbelly by going after Adware company Direct Revenue, who made millions by infecting PC’s with popup ads.
From TechWeb here:
Court documents supporting the New York Attorney General’s lawsuit against noted adware purveyor Direct Revenue show that the company hired a private investigator to track down an anti-spyware researcher, developed software to delete competing adware programs, and went to great lengths to make its own software stealthy.
Once downloaded to a user’s PC, Direct Revenue’s software opened pop-up ads on the screen as often as every 45 seconds. For its efforts, the company made almost $30 million in pre-tax profit in 2004 on total revenues of $38 million.
The documents, which include the petition and affirmation filed by the office of Eliot Spitzer, the state’s attorney general, as well as numerous supporting exhibits, are available in the New York County Clerk’s office, and have been posted online by anti-spyware activist and researcher Ben Edelman.
Among the documents were several related to an anti-spyware researcher known to Direct Revenue only as “webhelper” who operates the http://www.Webhelper4u.com site.
In one e-mail, Direct Revenue’s then-chief technology officer calls webhelper “our stalker friend.” In another message, this one written to the company’s chief executive, a staff member calls webhelper “a small timer” but then goes on to complain that the researcher’s naming of a Direct Revenue employee has interfered with obtaining business liability insurance for that worker.
In 2004, Webhelper also highlighted the link between a new site, Freephone.cc, and Direct Revenue, a tie the company had hoped to keep secret.
“It seems like our window of opportunity to promote freephone as ‘adware free’ may have passed us by,” Chris Dowhan, a Direct Revenue Vice President wrote.
Finally, in a May 2005 e-mail, Gary Kibel, an attorney at Direct Revenue s law firm, Davis & Gilbert, told Joshua Abram, the company’s chief executive, of the progress made by a private investigator in identifying webhelper.
“Briefly, the person, Patrick Jordan, is located in Florida. The address in the WHOIS is a MailBox, Etc. location, but they have obtained his true home address. He may be a tech person working for Jackson Hewitt (the tax company). He is about 50 years old,” Kibel wrote.
“Once we get all the information together, perhaps a letter to his true home address showing that we know more about him will have some results.”
Jordan now works at Sunbelt Software, a Florida-based anti-spyware company, where he has been a senior spyware researcher since July 2005.
In other documents, Direct Revenue executives bragged to a potential client how stealthy their adware software is, noted that the company could create an “incredibly polymorphic” program much harder for anti-spyware software to detect, and planned to release “torpedoes” that remove competing adware from vendors including eXact Advertising and spyware such as the Dyfuca porn dialer.
The documents paint a picture Stiennon believes is indicative of the industry as a whole. “Most of the adware companies have been acting with this same sort of mindset,” he said. “When you read this stuff, it’s clear that these people didn’t realize how evil they really were.”
The article goes on to suggest that other adware companies are now likely to delete all of their email related to internal business practices. This may be the case, so other state’s Attorneys General need to move quickly to indict these companies that were making millions in internet sleaze.
