I hope it was not felt that my post yesterday on Fuse Kit (being used by malware authors) would in any way impugn this very cool, very useful program. This has gotten some attention since SC Mag wrote a story on the general subject of malvertisements.
The author of Fuse Kit, Moses Gunesch, sent me an email today, understandably not to happy:
Fuse Kit is an animation system for Flash. It cannot be used for malicious purposes, in fact it has no networking code in it at all. The fact that this horrible malware person used it in a banner ad is entirely incidental (Fuse is used in banner ads for animation purposes).
Sandi Hardmeier’s mirrors these sentiments on her blog here.
Fuse Kit is a very cool, useful tool that happens to be used by malware authors to create animations in malicious advertisements. It’s about the same as saying that MS Paint is being used by the malware authors — it may be being used to create the animations, but it’s not the source of the scripts, the network activity, or anything that would directly contribute to the spawning of these ads.
Alex Eckelberry