We love crack sites. They are some of the best places to get spyware. Of course, the cracks are junk but who cares — people like us get lots of fun stuff to test!!!
Anyway, today’s Seen in the Wild is 180 Solutions downloading from a crack site. Thanks Sunbelt spyware researcher Adam Thomas.
From the 180 blog (“Trusting the Affiliate Model”):
Trust is indeed key to it all, and 180solutions is committed to being a role model in our industry by policing distribution and breeding the trust necessary to create and monetize what we call the content economy.
Cool!
I did ask 180 about this download on the crack site, and here’s what they said:
“…it turns out that this was disabled a few weeks ago. What is happening in the screenshot is that there is leftover code which will deliver the notification, however, if the user were to click “Yes”, our program would not be installed, given the fact that it has been disabled. Obviously we’ll take our lumps as long as leftover code presents itself on sites that are against our code of conduct. Our guys are working on making sure that the code is ultimately not leftover, but what matters here is that the install cannot occur.”
Alex Eckelberry
(Thanks Suzi)