[Kellie aka Ms. B]

I've come across a couple of incidents lately of DealNews coupon links showing up in adware. This isn't DealNews with their own adware, but rather other software displaying dealnews links, which ultimately go through dealnews affiliate links.

The first is ShopperReports. This is a component of the Zango/Hotbar adware. It comes bundled with the contextual pop-ups. ShopperReports displays a sidebar with shopping comparison listings. Several months ago, I started seeing them display coupons in this sidebar for the merchant site the end user is own. When clicking the coupon link, it goes through dealnews and then a dealnews affiliate link.

The second is PriceGong. This is also a shopping comparison adware application, now displaying coupons codes from dealnews which eventually goes through a dealnews affiliate link. I've had PriceGong installed a couple of times where I didn't know I was going to get it.

While I've seen instances in the past of a toolbar or adware application plugging in an unsuspecting affiliate's RSS feed, this is usually farily obvious when analyzing the clickstream.

It doesn't seem to be the case here. The dealnews click link in the adware is tagged with a referral tag naming the adware company. It is highly unlikely that either of these two adware companies are displaying ads in which they are not receiving financial compensation. What it looks like is a syndicated deal, either PPC or rev share, between dealnews and the adware companies.

More than one way to backdoor into adware displays without having your own adware application.

[ecomcity]

Seems the Adwhore BHO commission thieves are still alive and prospering. Must Make their network reps proud when they see their super affiliates raping and pillaging both the merchants and fellow affiliates in the cookied marketplace. Oh... I see incentive marketers and their network handlers exclusively using these cookie cannons. not a stretch to put two and two together to see CJ -Linkshare-GAN ownership are partners in this robbery of merchants ecash registers.. LOL. Only the merchants with NO COUPONS now ( or ever) can escape from the daily beatings and robberies.

.... "Some of the web's bigger websites were flooded with a torrent of malicious banner ads after cyber crooks managed to sneak them onto syndication services operated by Google, Yahoo, and a third company, according to a security firm.

The ads - which attacked previously-patched vulnerabilities in Adobe's PDF Reader and Microsoft's DirectShow - starting appearing on sites such as the DrudgeReport, horoscope.com and lyrics.com last Friday, ScanSafe researcher Mary Landesman told The Register. They were delivered over networks belonging to Google's DoubleClick; Right Media'sYield Manager (owned by Yahoo); and Fastclick, owned by an outfit called ValueClick.

End users visiting sites that used the ad syndication services often saw nothing more than a brief flash as the malware-laced ads caused their browsers to open - and then close - a booby-trapped PDF file. But behind the scenes, the payload installed Win32/Alureon, a trojan that drops a backdoor on infected machines.

The malicious ads, which also appeared on slacker.com, ended on Monday, when the website used by the malware purveyors abruptly vanished. During their three-day stint, the attacks accounted for 11 percent of pages blocked by ScanSafe, a service used by businesses to prevent employees from visiting malicious sites.

The report, issued Wednesday, came the same day a Google executive called on internet service providers, website operators, and others to do more to combat malicious ads. Over the past few years, so-called malvertisements - which employ social-engineering and exploit code targeting vulnerabilities in operating systems and applications - have become an increasingly common way of spreading malware to the masses.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the help of the ad syndication services, which provide the software and services webmasters use to display ads to hundreds of millions of end users. DoubleClick, Right Media, and other networks have repeatedly been found to distribute malware-laced banner ads on of the net's most popular sites".... more...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09..._google_yahoo/

[Kellie aka Ms. B]

Have found yet another partnership between DealNews and an adware application. This time it is DropDownDeals which only "promotes" merchants via the adware once the end user is on the merchant's site.

Are the networks and merchants aware of DealNews partnerships with adware?