There are quite a few reasons underlying the rapid growth of malicious campaigns intended for web traffic monetization. First off, Internet marketing is a sphere which provides enormous profit-making opportunities, with an abundance of interested parties willing to get the bang for their buck. Furthermore, the blurred borderline between the legitimate and fraudulent online advertising makes it feasible for the criminals to avoid prosecution and keep their underhand networks up and running for months on end.
A whole separate stream of the web traffic abuse activity is exemplified by the service called MyStart Search . The idea behind it is to redistribute large volumes of illegally obtained user hits in a very peculiar way. The foothold making this tactic flourish is a piece of malicious software, usually an intrusive browser add-on, which is dropped into a computer system. By using the technique called “bundling” as the prevalent distribution model, the payload infiltrates a machine in a covert fashion. The default setup configuration of some affiliated free device drivers, multimedia players and browser extensions includes the drive-by without explicitly stating it.
The mischievous extension modifies the web browsing preferences on the compromised PC and recurrently triggers the rerouting of user traffic to a landing page which is tailored to function like a search engine homepage. However, aside from the Google-style design, there’s hardly anything useful or informative on it. All searches are redirected to a third-party service, which is an indication of the actual objectives being unrelated to enhancing the user experience. The truth is MyStart Search simply converts the traffic from hijacked computers into potential sales leads or page views for the affiliated advertisers. Certainly, this is being deployed at the expense of the affected users’ peace of mind.
The scenario described above is common for tens of active campaigns, including the infamous iStartSurf, Tuvaro, Rocket Search and Omiga Plus. Before targeted Internet regulations get adopted to take these sorts of semi-legit services down, the only applicable countermeasure is to prevent the infection . In particular, it’s recommended to carefully examine the setup terms when installing an arbitrary free application and make sure nothing is sneaking into the computer as an unexpected extra.
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