These days almost every developer of a widget or a gadget tells us they are targeting MySpace - so why should malware makers be different? Vitalsecurity.org has written a long article this morning on a company called Zango that offers free videos and games for MySpace but requires installation of a Zango Search Assistant and Toolbar as part of the use of the videos. That toolbar serves up ads.
Christopher Boyd of Vitalsecurity argues that this is particularly pernicious because it exploits the trust that MySpace’s young users have for the MySpace admin. He believes that a popup while on MySpace asking for permission to do anything will be presumed to originate from MySpace officially. This could well be.
This is, of course, only the newest addition to the small army of services becoming available to mine the huge userbase that is MySpace for shady commercial purposes. I know I get friend requests from fake, or at least very shallow seeming, women all the time - and I don’t think it’s because they saw my name on TechCrunch.
Pop-ups and adware are probably one of the most hated parts of the web for PC/IE users and the direction that this could take MySpace is truly terrible. MySpace themselves really ought to deal with this before the site’s reputation takes another big hit.
This also has the potential to damage the reputation of MySpace widgets and gadgets in general. How possible is it that users will simply stop embedding video from off site if the practice becomes associated with the installation of adware? The specific details are almost not even important, there is a real risk of guilt by association.
Comments
Are the founders of Myspace not ex-adware manufacturers themselves? Like breeds like …
i’m an ex-user of zango (both as an advertiser and user). as an advertiser, i didn’t not get high CTRs. as a user, i hated the pop-ups. either way, i hate adware so i finally removed it and also stopped advertising after 2 months.
i completely agree with you that it “… damage the reputation of MySpace widgets …”. that was the main reason why i stopped advertising as i did not want to be associated with adware.
adware is a horrible use of what could otherwise be a very interesting use of tech. MySpace (while maintaining its userbase) is making some very hasty moves and allowing all sorts of distracting pop-ups, embeds, edits, etc onto its site. i use MySpace and know that many of my peers do as well. however, there are a growing number of us that are in constant search of something less intrusive and bit more minimal. could we please have a middle ground between the death valley approach of facebook and the las vegas approach of myspace?
we recently had big trouble with an affiliate/publisher putting our affiliate programm in zango even though forbidden. it caused some really bad feedback from our normal an legally working affiliates and we found someone who kindly helped us find the bad guy. (sorry but my blog is in german.) these kind of things really cause trouble and we as a social web service (barter exchange plattform for media products) would not want to be associated with this kind of AdWare / MalWare.
I thought tagworldwidgets.com was already doing the adware/widget thing? Nothing new I guess, these guys have all been in the adware business for years.
I have been noticing this for sometime….i’m not sure if you are familar with Protowall (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protowall) and everytime i log into myspace it has to block around 20 some packets from Zango…its a real pain
Well, I will say that it was a nice move from Zango :p
Anyway, we all are sick of adwares and I am sure that these articles will certainly enlighten people and will make them aware of what is right and what is wrong..and I am sure a community….like ZANGO IS AN ADWARE will start soon
Regardless of people’s past careers and businesses were, MySpace went beyond them to become a phenomena and a great network. There are some great widgets out there that can make MySpace more useful to users. Companies like Zango are damaging not only MySpace but could potentially tag many great widgets as harmful and not trustworthy. Not all P2P clients were malware / adware based tools, but a few of them tagged the whole industry as irresponsible.
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