We’ve written before about Direct Revenue’s demise.
However, it’s still to early to say that this bugger is dead. We’re still seeing Direct Revenue binaries and sites out there.
They have 64 known sites that are still assigned IP addresses and DNS servers, which make them active even if they cannot be accessed any longer, and 25 are active and also still registered to them under their thinkingmedia.net business name. The majority of the sites do not expire until the January through August 2008 timeframe.
Since the end of 2005, when Direct Revenue claimed they were cleaning up their act, they went through all their servers where they stored their adware files and selectively removed only the main adware BHO dlls, leaving all their components still as live downloads.
Until they let every one of their sites expire, delete all their files on the servers, and cancel their services for their sub domains, it’s too soon to say that this group has ceased operations.
Our latest site list is here (pdf). We also have a list of active binaries we are tracking, here (pdf).
Alex Eckelberry
(Thanks to Patrick Jordan)