I just don’t understand all the popups I get to buy screensavers and smiley faces. I simply cannot comprehend why anyone would pay actual money for this kind of “service”. As an economist, I would say, well somebody is buying them, or else they wouldn’t be selling them. However, as a consumer, I’ve got to think that no one is surrendering actual monetary wealth in order to purchase a more intricate screen saver than what came with Windows in the first place. So, my questions:
How much does a pop up campaign cost? I’ve been getting the same damn ads for over 3 years, and on as many computers in that period. That can’t be cheap, can it?
Is this a viable business, as in “I would like to design screensavers and smiley faces, and then sell them to the public at a fair price” or is this more of a pyramid scheme, get your e-mail address, etc. That is, is slinging the screensaver the goal or not?
If this is on the up and up, what does a screen saver cost? How about a smiley face?
If this is a trick to get your e-mail address, has there ever been any studies to see what this information is worth? For example, I get several e-mails a day wanting to pitch penis enlarging drugs utilizing bad grammar. Even if the marginal cost of these e-mails is nearly zero, it still seems likes colossal waste of time. So, plenty of neverdogoods know at least one of my e-mail addresses, but what have they received from this information? Nothing. I’ve got to believe the payout is one person per, I don’t know a million? What exactly is the business model for an internet criminal, and does it actually pay off in this day and age?
Thanks for the input, and, just to be clear, I’m not asking for tips on how to rid my computer of spyware.
From the experienes of a glurge-prone secratary in my organization, I can address numbers 2 and 3 (she uses the god-damn things in her e-mails all the time!). They do this to get your e-mail address and then resell them, or at least this secretary complains all of the time about junk-emails that she receives after downloading the smileys and seems to be beset by a constant pattern of downloading smileys, getting a new e-mail address, downloading, moving addresses, etc. ad nauseum.
Also, the screensaver programs and some of the smileys install a “search bar” or other similar type of browser hijack that will direct a lot of traffic towards their sites and generate ad revenue.
Apparently, so some people, the exchange of computer functionality for stupid little yellow faces is worth it.
:rolleyes: :dubious: :smack: :eek: :mad: :o
Luckily I’ve put down my eight Washingtons and those puppies were compliments of The Dope.
Some of those smiley programs and cute mouse pointers come with remote-access trojans that let nefarious types access your computer. On its own, your PC’s not worth much, but when aggregated into a “botnet,” tens of thousands of PCs are a formidable force to be used for things like brute-force attempts to break into a system, or what’s called a distributed denial of service attack to knock someone (typically a business) offline.
There’s also a fair bit of money involved. Someone wants to disrupt Metropolis Savings And Loan. They find someone with a botnet and arrange to buy use of it for a day. I don’t know exactly how much money tends to be involved, but for the guy that’s already sold 10,000 smileys at five bucks a pop or whatever, it’s free money.
I wouldn’t be surprised if renting out the botnet is the more profitable activity, and the costs associated with spam-trolling for smileys are a write-off expense. A botnet owner blackmailed several offshore (off the U.S. shores, that is - Costa Rica, IIRC) betting sites in late February. Their sales pitch was as follows:
“Nice betting site. Shame if something were to happen to it during March Madness, when I know for a fact that you make $30,000,000. Maybe if you gave me $200,000 I would go find someone else’s life to ruin.”
Aha - this is the story I was thinking of. A few other articles turned up revenue numbers close to my WAG of $30M, and noted that other major events (Grand National, World Cup, Super Bowl, World Series) also generate spikes in betting, and commensurate spikes in extortion attempts.
So, I sure hope those ;js and :Ds are worth it to your secretary friend, because pretty soon she’ll be :eek: and and :mad: when she gets 0wned.
You’re asking the right questions: most people don’t and end up in trouble.
Primarily, they’re putting spyware on your computer. Thus you get popup ads, or your search is redirected to their sites. They turn around and get ad money for the popups and for “special treatment” (i.e, their site gets featured in any search) and ads on their site.
They also probably harvest addresses and sell them to spammers. You can collect millions of addresses (especially if you search for the hundreds of e-mail addresses that are cached on any computer) and sell them for a couple of hundred dollars a shot.
The bot thing is still new and there are easier ways to set one up (people don’t secure their computers, so it’s easy to find security holes to sneak in a bot). But I wouldn’t be surprised if they were eventually used for this, however.
:eek: 
:mad: :o