2 Comments

Interview with a Direct Revenue Programmer

Jan 14, 2009
by

Here is a very interesting interview with one of the programmers for Direct Revenue where he talks about how he uninstalled viruses and adware and how they kept them from doing the same to them. He also talked about how they were slowly able to talk him into doing stuff for them.

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.

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. Source: philosecurity

Which reminds me of Wayne’s post about the Slow cracking of our teacups and how we won’t stand for someone to break our cups, but we don’t mind a crack here or there. It also reminds me of one of my first posts where I interviewed someone who worked for 180solutions, 180 From The Inside Out.

It’s an interesting read if only to see how a programmer could work for an adware company like Direct Revenue, and even more interesting to note that they turned down many things that they asked them to do. That might be a good follow up interview. I would bet that many people would say they failed in respect to keeping the software from being installed through exploits. He also said that antivirus companies were actually removing a registry key that kept the software from being installed again. Just think, Microsoft could’ve stopped them with one registry key update from Windows Update.

About Jimmy Daniels

A reluctant blogger, Windows XP guy, Nascar fan and long time affiliate marketer, Jimmy Daniels has been favoring his kids over everything else, as he should be.
You can find Jimmy on Twitter: @jdaniels.

Filed under: Adware, Spyware, Greynets, & Internet Fraud + Security Issues
  • http://www.rhinofish.com Pat Grady

    Now that was an intriguing interview! I'm dropping a link on my Legend buddy, she'll love reading this one!

    The stuff he shared in the interview you linked to needs to be read so that people in our industry develop the proper perspective in which to view the majority of these players, on both the sophistication and intent fronts.

  • http://www.affiliatefairplay.com kelliestevens

    I caught PaperGhost's response to that interveiw earliet today. The interview actually generated to response's by PG:

    http://www.vitalsecurity.org/2009/01/direct-reven… http://www.vitalsecurity.org/2009/01/direct-reven…

    It's also well worth the time to read through the comments. Another past DR coder responds as well.

    It is a great insight behind the scenes of these types of companies. It's also a lesson in justification of unethical behavior…soemthing I still see today.

    And it's a great lesson is spin. Being someone who intentionally installed more than one copy of DR (even from their own fully controlled distribution systems), I'm not buying all the claims made in the article or comments. They may truly believe what they are saying, but I don't think all the views held by at least 2 of the programmers were held by the owners and management of DR at all. JMO of course.