Interesting Interview: (Former) Adware Author Speaks

During my recent epic battle to rid my computer of malware, a friend sent me a link to this interview with a former adware author, on the fascinating Philosecurity blog:

S: Let’s back up a second. Why did you write adware?

M: I was utterly and grindingly broke for a little while. I started working on SPAM filtering software. That work got noticed by [Direct Revenue], who hired me to analyze their distribution chain. For a little while, the site through which all their ads ran was something like top 20 in Alexa. Monstrous, really huge traffic. Maybe 4 or 5 months into my tenure there, a virus came out that was disabling some of the machines that we had adware on. I said, “I know enough C that I could kick the virus off the machines,” and I did. They said “Wow, that was really cool. Why don’t you do that again?” Then I started kicking off other viruses, and they said, “That’s pretty cool that you kicked all the viruses off. Why don’t you kick the competitors off, too?”

It was funny. It really showed me the power of gradualism. It’s hard to get people to do something bad all in one big jump, but if you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.

S: Did you feel this was the gently sloping path to Hell?

M: Oh yeah! Absolutely. [ laughs ] I actually believe that if you sum up everything I did it comes out positive, if only because I kicked off an awful lot more adware than I installed.

S: What was Direct Revenue’s business model?

M: Their business model was that they would buy a screensaver from somebody, or develop it themselves. It would be some stupid thing like a guy who’s washing their screen. Looks like a window washer guy? They’d say “Hey, if you want this, install our adware and you can have it for free.” An astonishing number of people will do that.

It really is truly amazing how much these adware/malware folks know about operating systems...Windows exploits in particular.

In any case, I've taken Mr. Adware's advice -- in the interview he was asked, "In your professional opinion, how can people avoid adware?", and he responded, "Um, run UNIX." My desktop is now completely Windows-free and happily running kubuntu Linux, and I am seriously loving it so far. It's quick to install, easy to set up, and so far has run very smoothly for everything I've wanted to do with it. So, yay!