[swimmer]

"Police Go Back to Class to Catch Internet Crooks" story at
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...rnet_police_dc
"As always, the only way for an investigator to catch a cyber criminal is to learn their tricks. "To truly understand malware they have to use it. To understand hacking they have to do it," Haagman said." (Hmm ... think the feds & pols can learn enough to give the parasite rackets a run for their money too? lol)

[SandraR]

Great story Thanks!

[ecomcity]

As the worlds online consumers become the victims of those seeking to develop Malware to bleed them of their bank funds the Cybercrime units are developing skills. All the cybercrime focusing comes down to following the money trail as the real professional cybercriminals are money motivated. Not suprising they are focusing in on affiliate networks as the monitizers of spammers, privacy info peddlers, credit card and identity thieves.

"As criminals turn to high-tech gadgets and the Internet to commit crimes ranging from extortion to drug dealing, computer forensics is rapidly becoming as crucial to an investigation as DNA evidence, police say....."

"In the training exercise, investigators discovered in a deep corner of the hard drive a nasty piece of malware known as a "Trojan" installed on the machine without the user's knowledge.

Criminals use "Trojans" and "backdoors" to infect PCs. An army of vulnerable machines can then be programmed to execute a digital denial-of-service attack on a Web retailer or flood the Internet with dubious e-mail messages aiming to defraud users out of their bank details in a typical phishing expedition.

The prospect of stopping zombie PC attacks from every corner of the globe is a new criminal threat.

As always, the only way for an investigator to catch a cyber criminal is to learn their tricks. "To truly understand malware they have to use it. To understand hacking they have to do it," Haagman said. ....

[RoadKill]

I just came from that new clickbanksuccess forum which I won't put a link to here since it seems like I remember it being against some sort of rules are something but the thread starts with the letters ECM.

Anyway, they were talking about how this software that this guy on the forum sells and how the merchant can use it to turn off the affiliate commisions by checking a box in the software.

quote:

---

"then you must disable "enforce affiliate registration"
This will allow them to earn commission via the hoplink."

---

Now the idea is to only pay affiliates that are registered with the merchants software, all the other affiliates that promote the merchant with regular hoplinks they got from ClickBanks marketplace only think they are going to get paid, heres what an affiliate commented:

quote:

---

"if the merchant uses software to disable the
hoplink from working, they should not be listed in the marketplace.
This could cause confusion, clickbank provides a link right along with
the listing in the marketplace which creates a hoplink for affiliates
to use for promotion, if this hoplink doesn't work the affiliate could end
up spending a lot of money promoting this for nothing."

---

Heres a couple more excerpts:

quote:

---

"This feature, by the way, is purely optional. It's turned "OFF" by default
and the merchant has to 'turn it on' to enable it."

"If you want to disable the affiliate registration, just un-check the box
beside "Enforce Affiliate Registration?" phrase."

---

Another affiliate had this to say:

quote:

---

"To give a merchant the power to turn my commissions on and off with the flick of switch or in this case a checkbox is pure stupidity and any affiliate thats goofy enough to promote this kind of merchant deserves whatever he gets, or don't get as the case may be."

---

Software salesman:

quote:

---

"Besides, every merchant already has 'the power to turn
my commissions on and off with the flick of switch"."


"1. Set affiliate commission to 0%

2. Alternative payment processor

3. A prominent "Earn Money Link" on the sales page - what's to stop
a prospective buy from clicking on that link, become an affiliate and
then buys via his own link? The original affiliate loses out.

4. Using a 'direct payment link' method to unscrupulously embed his own
ID when a potential customer clicks on the order link."

---

Is this blatant or what?
I'm posting this in the legal opinions on parasite ware because this sounds like it's got to be illegal and also pasrasitic. What do you thing??