Not Much Money In MySpace Ads... But How About Some Spyware!
from the oops dept
While MySpace hasn't been able to do much to capitalize on all of those banner ad impressions the site is supposedly getting, it appears that others are figuring out how to monetize it for them. The latest is that some scammers figured out how to use a vulnerability to serve up spyware to MySpace visitors through (you guessed it) all of those ad banners. The researcher who discovered this claims the spyware got installed on over a million computers -- exploiting a flaw that Microsoft had patched months ago. Of course, this isn't the first time that MySpace has been used to distribute spyware. It seems that, even if Rupert Murdoch doesn't figure out how to squeeze a lot of money out of MySpace, scammers will do their best to do it for him.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
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yo
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Re: yo
Thank you
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This crap has got to stop. Techdirt simply needs to enable moderation and registration and remove anonymous posting.
This site is built on the same stuff as slashdot (it used to be anyway), it shouldn't be hard.
Or just pick some volunteer moderators to delete posts they deem as "crappy".
Or just do a regexp for *first* on the first 3 posts made, if it's in there it doesn't get posted and the IP of the person posting gets added to the httpd.conf's denied list. (PS, that's a joke)
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redirects
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Re: redirects
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YO
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yo yo
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yo yo yo
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I second that.
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Yet, I contribute, for there is absolutely nothing worth saying about this aricle.
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lol..
But, people who spam with "first!" and bullshit like that, that gives nothing to the topic should just be IP banned. Most of them wouldn't even know how to get around it anyways -_-
That's my two cents.
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httpd.conf?
Oh and I almost forgot....
21ST!!!!
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Re: httpd.conf?
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.techdirt.com
looks like linux to me...
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T get back on the subject
And at first when I read this article it did amaze me that MySpace doesn't screen ads before they go up. But then I thought that there is little to no screening b/c there are all these backlashes on kids putting up half nude pictures.. So I am not too surprised... Just irritated.
But I still love Myspace and I am not giving it up.
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BTW: Last post! For the moment
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Lay Person
The Flash Player plugin versions
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Lay Person
The Flash Player plugin, versions 8 or less, are the culprit. All those fancy images that move around on your screens and in the ads use an application called Flash owned by Adobe Systems.
Get and install Flash Player 9. This will correct the flaw. It doesn't matter whether it's IE or Firefox they both use this application hence they are both vulnerable.
What happens is that when the Flash Player loads there is a brief window of time where the player allows code to enter a users machine thereby rendering it's destructive path.
That's pretty much it in lay terms.
Good luck!
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yeah!
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