Pop quiz, hotshot!

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the brand new way of wriggling out of a tight spot - yes, rather than throw your hands up and say, sorry, we kinda goofed again didn’t we, it seems that when you manage to get yourself tangled up in

a) websites promoting potential underage content and
b) a group of hardcore Cws hijackers pushing their wares from the darkest corners of Russia,

you simply apply the new 180 approach - that is, pull your software at the speed of light, then stick your fingers in your ears and do the la-la-la-we-can’t-hear-you technique. I mean, if it only gets thrown around a few blogs, Podcasts, one or two major sources of news distribution and a bunch of other places, keep your head down and eventually the storm will blow over, yes?

…well, no.

And so I come to you today, armed with a handy illustration of how not to pick your affiliates. It is my deepest wish that those of you out there who regularly find themselves sliced and diced will take notes, and keep all questions until the end.

Now, I don’t claim to be any expert on how 180 Solutions picks and chooses it’s affiliates. It’s all about the long tail, right? Though from what I’ve seen that broadly equates with gimp masks and Oompa-Loompahs, so I’m still probably going to be confused when I’ve finished rambling here. Anyway, the call sounds from the East - some crazy cats want to do business with you, comrade, in an online-push-your-Zango-software kind of way. Bearing in mind the numerous times you’ve been pummelled into the ground in the past…and also bearing in mind the (sadly messed up) reputation that software installs relating to Russia have…do you

a) Say yeppity-yep-yep, done deal JR after God-knows-what kind of check run on your potential affiliate and splatter your software all over their application, even though the app in question fires you to sites (with background ties to some very shady groups indeed) that ask you to pay for pictures of what appear to be kids with no clothes on with just one press of a button?

b) Have some lingering doubt in the back of your mind that some annoying whiney Limey will likely make a song and dance further down the line, but press on regardless or

c) Do a basic Google search on the contact details for the domain in question (Yapsearch / cash / browser), and find an email address that, oh noes, just happens to be listed in numerous publically available resources such as this one?

Okay, looks like we went for A, so fire up that money machine, baby! Now, the application is available to download - do you

a) Ever go back and, you know, try out any of these applications to see that they actually do what they say on the tin,

b) Get really, really worried that some annoying whiney Limey (curse you, Britain! Curse you and your Beatles and your funny teeth and your confusing breakfasts!) is going to make a big old song and dance, but press on regardless or

c) Discover from your continued investigations that started with the previously mentioned Email address that the actor John Malkovich is listed as the domain contact for Yapcash, the site that allegedly does all the affiliate-style wheeling and dealing. Furthermore, the same details are used for a group of sites at Eltel, a Russian ISP, including one site that redirects the user to browser exploits at paradise-dialer.com, which load trojans, spyware and dialers. Paradise-dialer’s whois places it as part of the CWS group known as Dimpy, aka BigBuks. Since the BigBuks whois is also given by mix-click, referred to by the yapbrowser/yapsearch whois, and the aforementioned servers at Pilosoft and Eltel (as well as the paradise-dialer server also at Pilosoft just a few IP addresses away) run many other sites that link back to browser exploits and child pr0n promotions run by BigBuks, it seems reasonable to assume that they are the same group of people.

All of the above takes about half an hour to find out - a further five minutes digging into the yap domains themselves reveals that they are in fact hosted alongside such wonderfully tasteful nuggets as r***rank, incest-pay-sites, young-nude-girls and of course, fantastic hijack sites such as instme.

Oh look, all of which are also available here.

Is it just me, or is this not rocket science?

“Pop quiz, hotshot…there’s a bomb on a bus. Once the bus goes 50 miles an hour, the bomb is armed. If it drops below 50, it blows up. What do you do? What do you do?”

I’ve heard on the Interweb grapevine that Mr Porter has completed his list of questions for the Yapbrowser people, so we may well get some answers to these questions in any case.

Looks like the clock is ticking…

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