At the unrelenting urging of my brother, who is enjoying very much his MySpace blog, and my mother, the dog lover who is finding other friends who dearly love their puffy, fluffy pooches, I finally agreed to join the club and create a MySpace profile. Although my family still does not understand what I do for a living, they were all abuzz this weekend on how I can “design” my own page.

Their fascination with the ability to control a piece of an online world has them bedazzled much like the shiny sparkly jewels you could simply punch onto your four-year old jeans. My family is hooked, as are millions of other online users who are able to create and manage a piece of their Internet heaven. What I found is a potential disaster for millions of computer users for whom this warning, tragically, might already be too late.

When you are designing your MySpace page, your first guest is not somebody you’d ever knowingly welcome - spyware!

After signing up for a MySpace page, you will find you are contacted by many friends who will offer links that will help you design your space. I was frankly surprised at the amount of people who contacted me who had used these online MySpace design “hubs” to build out there pages. I also found links on my families MySpace pages that took me to sites that offer free MySpace codes, this made me suspicious, so I thought I would go code snooping.

Most of the design information is brought to you as HTML or CSS. The dangerous part is what you give up for that free MySpace background or glittery image. Yes, everything comes with a price in this world, and unfortunately designing your MySpace page will cost you an occasional forced install or free graphics hosted from reported malware sites that link to redirects and other affiliate sites. Using teens and other MySpace users who do not understand that they are being used to deploy horrible tidings on their friends is a new low.

Bring in the Spyware disguised as free MySpace code!

Two of the sites that appeared to have many “free” MySpace design layouts, graphics and photo web sites like Freeze.com, who I found through their site register.premade-layouts.net, and videocodelab.com, who apparently is owned by Zango (formerly 180solutions). Yes, you can see where I am going with this. For free MySpace designs the user must agree to download the Zango search assistant as well as the Zango toolbar to access the “free” designs on the VideoCodelab site. I found many, many, of these free design sites targeted to MySpace users. Many of these sites (too many to list here, in fact) had bogus campaigns for co-registration leads as well as redirected affiliate links, and a few others had forced installs. One of them featured a screensaver download that had many of the most well-known spyware programs attached to it.

The golden ticket is that they also insert a linked add in the MySpace design in the users code to bring other potential MySpace design interested consumers to their site. The fun part was finding thousands of free graphics hosted on these sites that included links that redirected through affiliate links and then some.

Many of the free design sites had hosted images by a company (ImageShack proported Malware site) that offers an XMP API for affiliates or partner companies that have more than 500 image hits per day. The affiliate or partner companies have their code in the hosted link, so you can imagine hundreds of thousands of MySpace users putting up these graphics). These images were found in the code of a few that I had visited that were offering free images for MySpace design. I am sure it gets stickier from there.

MySpacepranks.com which appears to be also be owned by Zango (formerly 180Solutions) has affiliate code in their free graphics links they offer to the public from (http://www.photobucket.com/ register.php?pbaffsite=37) source: http://www.myspacepranks.com/ myspace-layouts.html. Photobucket pays affiliates per a CPA basis through Share results. The graphic is free for the MySpace consumer, however the link appears to be an affiliate link, someone is making money here and it does not appear to be the MySpace consumer.

Ok, now it is 10:30 PM PST and I just found videos you can host on your MySpace blog from Myspacepranks.com back to /www.videocodelab.com/ videos-humor.html. To play the video, you must first accept the Zango download in the form of a license acquisition which overrode my Microsoft player? If someone were to add this code to their MySpace blog, they would spread this to all of their friends and family and would probably have their profile blocked from MySpace as a result of adding it. I clicked on “Play video” a few more times and in doing so the Zango software automatically started installing on my computer, without a prompt this time or a request for acceptance from them. Scary.

First attempt to “Play Video”

I clicked on “Play Video” second time

I clicked on “Play Video” a third time and the install started without the previous prompts

I was going to include a larger list of sites that I found but did not want to warrant any additional free traffic to them. They appear to be faring pretty well with their targeted MySpace market as it is. I also found plenty of Commission Junction, Fast Click, Share Results, Linkshare and many more affiliate links on many of these free MySpace design sites to programs that surprised me concerning the merchant’s approval of these affiliates’ sites. Affiliate managers really need to take a deep look at who they are accepting in their programs.

There is no way I could show you all the information that I have found. I will leave the worst-case scenarios to those like Wayne Porter and Ben Edelman, who can elaborate far better then I concerning spyware, malware and redirects.

I never thought I would see the day when my own family was used to spread Trojans, forced installs, spyware and worse. I tried explaining this to my mom, and her response was, “That’s enough of that. So, when are you going to get your headlight fixed?” I suppose she, like most Internet users, didn’t appreciate being reminded that on the Internet, as in life, all those glittery free images, and all those free videos and free scripts are too good to be true.

http://www.revenews.com/heatherpaulson/2006/09/design_your_myspace_page_wtih.html

Share This Post
52 views