Spyware, Adware and Malware - Oh My!

I’ve been doing a bit of reading and experimenting lately in my spare time (yeah right!).

Anyhow, I have come across something that isn’t exactly new to the world of black hat but you might not have heard of it before.

Several months back - actually I think it was last year sometime - I was looking at the ZangoCash program.

What appealed to me about the program was that you could create a screensaver, package it with an installation and then every time someone installed your screensaver along with the zangocash toolbar, you’d get paid.

Paid-Per-Install

Which, of course, leads us into the world of getting paid to install stuff on people’s computers.

As I mentioned before, most of it is spyware. Not all but a good chunk of it is.

Now, in the world of pay per install, there are some installs that will notify the user that they’re about to be installed and get their agreement.

There are others, of course, that do no such thing. In fact, they’ll go out of their way to make sure the user doesn’t know about em.

And good luck if you need to uninstall it - LOL.

Do You Feel Lucky Punk?

The question you’ve got to ask yourself before you go all out and start doing this, however, is how lucky do you feel?

Installing spyware generates mucho hate! You’d better have some underwear made of asbestos!

There are tricks you can do to hide yourself like proxies, multiple accounts, etc. Basically the same types of things you would do to hide your black hat sites.

The Method

If you want to do this type of stuff, the first thing you’ll need to do is sign up with a program. There are several listed here.

The one that I’ve been toying around with is LuxeCash. I’d say this one is probably the hardest to detect and the most evil of the bunch

I guess that’s why it attracted me.

Anyhow, once you’ve been accepted into the program(s) you choose, you’ve got to figure out a way to distribute the installs.

One popular method that’s making the circles right now - and has been for several months - is using torrents and other file sharing software.

Using Torrents

If you decide to use a torrent, you’ll have to figure out a way to get someone to run your install executable. Let’s say that the torrent has the following files:

foo.nfo

setup.exe

readme.txt

Some torrents are going to have more, some less.

You want to add your new file which we’ll call LuxeCash.exe so it would look like this:

foo.nfo

setup.exe

readme.txt

LuxeCash.exe

Will this work? Hah - not likely. In fact, as soon as you upload it to the torrent sites, you’ll be banned.

So what’s an evil black hat to do???

Well, what you really want is for the user to install your pay per install program when they run that setup.

File Binding

What you’re going to do is ‘bind’ the two executables together like this:

Setup.exe + LuxeCash.exe

The name of the file will still be ’setup.exe’ and when the user runs it, the magic occurs.

What happens is that the executables will get decompressed and placed on the users hard drive. Then the two executables will be run in the order you specified.

Of course, you’ve got to make sure the pay per install program is totally silent or you won’t get many users installing it.

How to Do File Binding

There are actually a couple of ways to do file binding. The most common one that is making the rounds right now is using a piece of software called IExpress.

It comes with the default windows installations so it’s not likely to be detected as spyware anytime soon.

I created a video for a friend a bit earlier today. You can see it here:

File Binding Demonstration

Note: The video is not a professional quality video and you can hear the hum of my wife’s computer in the background but it walks you step by step through the process of binding two exe’s.

Create The Torrent

Once you’ve bound the files, you’ll need to create your torrent. Upload the torrent and then seed it. Yes, that’s very, very vague. I’ll do a video in the near future on that as well.

Show Me the Money!

So how much can you expect to earn from this?

Well, as usual, that depends.

First, if you’re doing this with stuff that isn’t very popular then you won’t get many downloads.

Second, if you are repackaging very large installs (500MB+) then it’ll take a long time to seed and you’ll probably get fewer downloads.

The third thing is something that is totally out of your control. How many users are actually going to install the product? I don’t know what those numbers are but I can tell you it’s not 100%. A lot of people simply take the product and leave it on their hard drive.

Why? I dunno. I did the same thing when I used to crack software back in the 80’s. I remember buying 500 5 1/4″ floppy disks to store software I was downloading.

Of course, I would rarely install any of it - if I could even find it - LOL.

Fourth - how quickly are you getting banned? If the torrent gets banned, you are not likely to make much because people won’t see it. Which leads us to the last issue…

Five - how many torrent sites did you upload your torrent to? The more the merrier but it’s going to take a bit of time.

Ok. So let’s look at some ‘hard’ numbers from my experiments.

My first torrent got about 30 seeds. Out of those 30 seeders, there were about 5-10 installs.

Not much to write home about because you’re only getting paid 10 cents an install.

For this to work you need big, big, BIG numbers of installs.

You’d need 1000 installs a day to make $100.

If you figure I got 20% of people who downloaded to install, that means you’d need 5000 downloads per day to make $100.

Now, it is certainly possible to hit the jackpot on one torrent. But you might have to go through 10 torrents or more before you find that torrent.

In the meantime, you’ll be bringing in a few dimes here and there

Is It Worth It?

Honestly, that’s only a question that you’ll be able to answer yourself. If you’re anal retentive like I have been while I was experimenting, you’ll find yourself cleaning up a few files, getting rid of .rar, .zip and so on.

I’ve only uploaded about 8 torrents while playing with this.

Of course, each torrent gets quicker as the process is streamlined.

I would say that you could probably do 20-30 torrents in a couple of hours worth of work.

Some people are saying that they’re getting about $50-$100 for that work they do.

Another thing you’ll have to consider is how the Spyware companies make money.

Spyware - Where is the Profit?

Consider this…the spyware companies pay you up to $1.50 for each install. That means they are shelling out a significant sum of money.

To make matters worse, their installs are removed by people when they run spyware programs. So, in some cases, they’ll pay more than once to keep their install on a user’s computer.

Any time you look at a company you should think about where the profit is. Why are they doing it? What’s their business model?

It’s a great exercise and will help you to find potential niches to make some money in.

Anyhow, the spyware companies make money in two ways.

First, they sell the traffic that they get. The traffic is obtained by them opening popup windows as well as redirecting people to different sites when they search and browse.

The second is to use that traffic to promote their own opportunities.

I’d love to see some numbers of what these guys are making but haven’t seen anything I’d consider reliable yet.

Is it Evil?

Oh yes my friend. It’s definitely black hat bordering on illegal. Depends on where you live and how you go about getting those pay per install programs installed.

Every time one of those programs gets installed, it’s potential profits that are taken out of YOUR pocket.

Why? Because the spyware programs often replace adsense codes and other affiliate urls with their own.

So if someone surfs to your site and they have this spyware on their system then you’ll lose out on potential revenue.

Summary

All in all, I really would not recommend taking this course of action unless you have a way to automate it.

And when you automate it, you’ll be throwing a lot of crap at the wall.

Chances are you’ll get banned - a lot.

You’ll piss a lot of people off.

In general, it’s definitely not the way to win friends and influence people.

G-Man

P.S. Technically I suppose I should be calling the spyware malware but whatever