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March 14, 2005

Spy control

Hooray for the Federal Trade Commission, which recently shut down a company in Spokane, Washington that was marketing a fraudulent software program called "Spyware Assassin."

Unfortunately, the company, MaxTheater, is just a little fish in a sea churning with slippery scammers. According to one tally, there are currently over 150 "rogue" programs parading as anti-spyware software.

Spam and bogus spyware scams are often tightly linked. Most of the dubious anti-spyware programs are heavily promoted by spammers, who receive a commission on every sale. One that's been spammed heavily in recent weeks is Spy-Control.com. The site goes by numerous aliases, including Morpheus-spyware.info, Deletespyware.info, Spy-destroyer.com, etc.

In fact, there are some 160 domains hosted at that same IP address (82.114.48.64). Besides all the spyware-related names, there are dozens that offer "green card services" (e.g. Greencusa.info, Myusavisa.org, etc.) A related set of 89 sites (Ad-protect.com, Green-card-usa.org, etc.) is hosted at IP address 217.17.157.140.

One source claims the mother ship of all these sites is Global Entertainment Solutions, Ltd in Israel. GES is the company behind the (now defunct) Sexter peer-to-peer porn service.

Posted by brian at March 14, 2005 12:47 PM