Why Adware Authors Love IE and Windows

An adware author explains:

Most adware targets Internet Explorer (IE) users because obviously they’re the biggest share of the market. In addition, they tend to be the less-savvy chunk of the market. If you’re using IE, then either you don’t care or you don’t know about all the vulnerabilities that IE has.

IE has a mechanism called a Browser Helper Object (BHO) which is basically a gob of executable code that gets informed of web requests as they’re going. It runs in the actual browser process, which means it can do anything the browser can do– which means basically anything. We would have a Browser Helper Object that actually served the ads, and then we made it so that you had to kill all the instances of the browser to be able to delete the thing. That’s a little bit of persistence right there.

If you also have an installer, a little executable, you can make a Registry entry and every time this thing reboots, the installer will check to make sure the BHO is there. If it is, great. If it isn’t, then it will install it.

(Via Bruce Schneier.)

Blake Ross On Microsoft's Great Culpability

There's a fine interview with Blake Ross, one of the prime movers behind Firefox, from Seattle PI. Mostly it's just sensible stuff - which augurs well for Ross's start-up, whatever it is - but it contains one insight about the consequences of Microsoft's persistent non-development of Internet Explorer that bears quoting:

The truth is I think Microsoft is very directly responsible for spyware and adware and the pop-up ads in general that proliferated across the Web after they abandoned their product. I mean, this is the world's most-used software application ever ... and I just think it's irresponsible for a company to abandon it simply because they can't find a financial incentive to continue development on it.

(Via Slashdot.)

One More Reason for Open Source

Among the many reasons for choosing open source software, one that is often overlooked is that it is much harder to hide things in code that can be inspected. There's bound to be some hacker somewhere with too much time on his/her hands who will take a look at the source code (and make sure that the source code compiles into the binary provided).

This makes adware/spyware far less of a problem for open source code than for your usual binary blob of freeware/shareware, which might contain anything. Anyone who is tempted to download some of the latter may care to peruse this report first. Then go and find some open source instead.