Does Sextracker install spyware?

[Verbal]

Is Sextracker infecting surfer's computers with spyware without their approval? I know this issue has come up before, but it seems to be a hot topic on some other boards again... has new info come out about this and is it true?

[Greenguy]

I have no "yes or no" info, but I will say there is a reason a lot of places have banned 3rd party counters.

[GeorgeTH]

Lets put the answer this way: none of my Adaware/Spybot/Whatsoever programs report anything but Cookies from Sextracker!
But that doesn't mean they have some sneaky piece of spyware which hasen't been added to the database of these removal tools yet...

So the answer in clear German is "Jein" - that's a 'J' for "ja" [yes], and an 'ein' for "nein" [no] - don't laugh: this is now an acceptable term for indecisiveness in German...

[cd34]

http://antivirus.about.com/od/virusd.../movieclip.htm

That url supposedly talks about the curacau division of sextracker.

I agree with Greenguy. I've heard several stories, witnessed some pretty strange behavior, and have heard Yes or No from a few people.

[Verbal]

Article from last month: Two adware firms battling in court

Based on the Caribbean island of Curacao, Avenue Media has ties to Shawn Boday, who in court documents is listed as a "sales consultant." Boday, who could not be reached for comment, is the founder of Seattle-based Flying Crocodile Inc. Flying Crocodile operates SexTracker.com, a compilation of pornographic Web sites and marketing tools for adult Web masters.
...
DirectRevenue also claims that it was unaware that Avenue Media was distributing its own adware program, dubbed Internet Optimizer.

The plot thickens.

[Nickname]

Ive heard loads of webmasters reporting of spyware stuff in sextracker.....

[Jim]

Does Sextracker install spyware?
Does a bear shit in the woods?
Is the pope Catholic?

[Ms Naughty]

More importantly, does the Pope shit in the woods and are bears catholic?

[Taass]

Originally Posted by Jim

Does a bear shit in the woods?
Is the pope Catholic?

I've allways wondered about those too

[urb]

Hey, come on... don't bring the Pope into this, he ain't very well at the moment.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory...olitan/3020587

[Opti]

Saw Aga post that Avenue/FCI targetted UK surfers for a while.. then sent an update to infected surfers that took 30% of Meat/Aga's UK Traffic overnight (30% of yours and mine too, but we werent aware)

The software aparently detected when a surfer hits the join page of an adult site... and automatically changes the referal code to their own code.. or reditects the surfer off to another site or whatever. *SUCKS*

Doe's anyone else feel ripped off?

[Meat]

Sextracker have been using there counters and dialers to drop trojan virus onto peoples computers for a few years.

Once a computer has been infected sextracker can then send commands to the computer to make it behave anyway they want.

It can redirect pages, it can change urls, it can access peoples email and instant messsenger lists and instruct them to send an email to everyone in the contact list on the users behalf recommending whatever site sextracker want to promote, it delivers op ups, it can be used to launch DDos attacks...

in short the computer no longer belongs to the owner but to Sextracker. Commands to computers can be done down to an individual IP number and are issued from a bank of servers located in various parts of the world

If you send traffic to sextracker or moneytree and your surfer is infected by the trojan then you have lost that surfer forever, they will never be able to access your site again if ST decide they dont want them to.

We caught them when we discovered we had an infected computer, we typed in netpond.com and it sent us directly to moneytree, in fact no matter what URL we typed into browser it redirected us to Moneytree.

We bought two new computers and infected one of them and then we spent 2 weeks videoing what happened to each computer we then flew our lawyer over and he spent 3 days doing same thing.

30% of our clients traffic dissapeared over night and at that stage we were running millions of hits a day so you can do the math.

[GenXer]

Sextracker is on a few of my sites, and I'm thinking about dropping it. Don't want my surfers getting annoying crap on their computers.

[Meat]

GenXer

Dont think... DO

You are being screwed and thats a gaurantee, as long as u run sextracker products you will be getting traffic stolen from you.

[cow]

Wow, this scares me off.

But how can it be that almost all large website like worldsex and thehun have a sextracker counter ? They must have tons of traffic getting lost to Sextracker.

Moo

[LB]

Sextracker = spyware ... fucking malicious spyware.

Very clever too ... I dont know how they do it, but I have had to reformat Harddrives for multiple PC's to get rid of their trojans. cant get rid of it with the spyware programs I use.

[jayo]

I think almost everything you have to install on your computer is spyware these days!

[Verbal]

Well, I'll be pulling Sextracker from the last couple of sites I've left it on. I can't remember the last time I glanced at their stats anyways... and if this spyware issue is actually proven to be true, those fuckers can rot in hell.

[GeorgeTH]

Originally Posted by LB

Sextracker = spyware ... fucking malicious spyware.

Very clever too ... I dont know how they do it, but I have had to reformat Harddrives for multiple PC's to get rid of their trojans. cant get rid of it with the spyware programs I use.

I'm still not convinced: I haven't seen any evidence that Sextracker itself installs spyware...

Aren't you guys confusing the effects of the "Cool Websearch" trojan with the Sextracker counter code?
It's well know that CWS is triggered when it finds a Sextracker code on the page, and then re-directs the browser and starts an advertising-pop-up hell to porn and casino sites; I documented this in a post here over a year ago... And there are new (and harder to remove) versions of CWS released almost every week!

Edit: all I have had confirmation of is, that by following a particular combination of links to the Sextracker pages, people can get an unwanted dialer installed (without being asked). Bad enough!

[GenXer]

Georige, I agree. When I visit my sites that have sextracker and turn off my firewall , I don't get anything on my computer except a cookie installed when I run a spyware check.
I haven't had anything installed from them on my computer. Anyone have more proof?

[LB]

Originally Posted by GeorgeTH

I'm still not convinced: I haven't seen any evidence that Sextracker itself installs spyware...

Aren't you guys confusing the effects of the "Cool Websearch" trojan with the Sextracker counter code?
It's well know that CWS is triggered when it finds a Sextracker code on the page, and then re-directs the browser and starts an advertising-pop-up hell to porn and casino sites; I documented this in a post here over a year ago... And there are new (and harder to remove) versions of CWS released almost every week!

Edit: all I have had confirmation of is, that by following a particular combination of links to the Sextracker pages, people can get an unwanted dialer installed (without being asked). Bad enough!

If your lawyer wants to get in touch with mine, I would be happy to give you what you need.

Meat has a lot more on them than me though, and his lawyer has a shit load more than mine.

[RawAlex]

Considering there is a trojan called "sextracker.trojan", I think the answer would be fairly clear.

At what point in a surfers "life" with sextracker that these trojans / browser help objects / scumware / viruses (call it what you may) are installed and activated is subject for discussion. There is information from third parties (non-adult, virus tracker types) that point to sextracker using virii as a business action.

Let me say this: There is no reason in the world I can think of anymore to have a counter on a website. I remove them if I find them on any of my older pages, and I would encourage you to do the same. If you current host does not offer some sort of stats package, you need to change hosts.

I won't say "don't do business with sextracker", but I would say you always want to look at the business practices of the people you choose to do business with.

Alex

[Opti]

Originally Posted by GenXer

Georige, I agree. When I visit my sites that have sextracker and turn off my firewall , I don't get anything on my computer except a cookie installed when I run a spyware check.
I haven't had anything installed from them on my computer. Anyone have more proof?

PULLLEEASE.... what are you saying? Meat's detailled rundown wasn't convincing because your spyware checker bell didnt go off!

Presumably no-ones spyware checker went off and if sextracker distributed their trojans for years though their counter it also slipped past 100's of experienced webmasters too.

There is a couple of really interesting threads on Oprano where a bunch of allegedly ex-sextracker people dish up bucketloads of dirt, about what they say was done, thats worth reading.


Is anyone trustworthy on the job to setup an open source counter product webmasters can trust now?.. Sounds like enough people want them still.. If Netpond (or anyone actively helping stop sextracker) setup one today... I'd add it to my sites simply to support the cause.

If big companies decide the easy money is over and they are going to rape and pilliage the market on way out back door for Brazil.. affiliate webmasters may as well all concentrate on Ebay as Adult income wise for 2006.

Can someone who knows for certain all the right names, please post a list of all sextracker affiliated counter domains?

[GeorgeTH]

Originally Posted by Opti

...Meat's detailled rundown wasn't convincing because your spyware checker bell didnt go off!
...
There is a couple of really interesting threads on Oprano where a bunch of allegedly ex-sextracker people dish up bucketloads of dirt, about what they say was done, thats worth reading.

Any LINKS?

[Opti]

There was a few threads George... and I actually didnt post links as i didnt know which of the posters may be genuine or not.. I'll pull a couple of interesting quotes for you though to get idea. (just do a search over there for threads in the last week with "sextracker" or "Avenue" mentioned in them for the rest)

this report has some details of allegations too..
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/busine..._adware09.html
(from this post)

4. Unbeknownst to me (my former partner at Sexlist and I were to have 60 points on FCI/AM's adware deal) FCI had started developing a second, confidential adware product incorporating Bama's feature set, as well as additional functionality Shawn and I had come up with.

5. While a friend/business acquitance was visiting on business Shawn and I (the third person can't be identified) discussed the feasability of distributing through the p2p's as well as through viral email methods.

6. FCI had a employee (interestingly enough he's posted on this thread) working full time adding URL's into the config. These URL's would have either all, or some percentage of their traffic redirected. This list included but was not limited to the top sites on Sextracker! All this work was done from the Seattle offices of FCI, not in Caracao. The employee was on the FCI payroll.

They are taking the few hits that DO convert by means of inserting their own affiliate id's as well as redirecting join pages to their own MoneyTree program. This practice is detrimental to the entire industry. Affiliate programs (some are/were actually moneytree clients) are damaged when conversions drop and webmasters move to another program. Webmasters suffer damages in more direct ways, their joins are stolen from them.

Insert/replace affiliate id's. If a end user maciacally dropped on a paysite without being referred then Bode added his own affiliate ID, or redirected to his own sites. The latter is the case pertaining to ifriends. Shawn had serious issues with ifriends and was determined to steal as much of their traffic as possible for Tricams. Another target was KC's counter which Shawn wanted to hit so he could buy at a more favorable (for him) price.

Aga at netpondcash

We woke up one morning to a 30% drop in traffic and revenue.. at the time we were handling all of a MAJOR players non US traffic. millions of hits per day. They basically redirected all hits that were meant for our domain.. to the moneytree dialer.

I bought a new pc.. infected it with thier shit and videod the evidence.. we even flew our Lawyer over the Atlantic to England to help out.

Everyone says that there was no way that they could make a 30% dent in revenue.. but most of our revenue came from UK traffic.. and they had been installing spyware on UK surfers for years.. I would imagine they have infected a huge amount of UK pcs.. .

(from this thread)

So, we've established they were distributing through the counters. Those installs are/were worth .50 each. How much do they owe you?

If you are:

Sublime Directory- $653,143.00
Consumption Junction- $390,000

These numbers are based on the value of an install being .50, and unique stats from Sextracker Site Ranks. THESE AMOUNTS ARE FOR A 24 HOUR PERIOD.

I've no idea what's true and whats not.. but there is no doubt these guys have done some AMAZING things.. its hard to get my head around just how much money this must involve.. much safer than drug dealing from Panama but just as profitable by the looks..

Its no wonder they did it when you start looking at how easy it has been and the astronomical cash that might be involved. and doubtless many of the people hurt hardest simply wish they had done it first anyway as the chances of them being held accountable seem slim to me.




And if you think that's a shocker.. has anyone seen the Homegrown -v- Voice Media complaint papers!! Set your face to stunned and click here:
http://*************/corporate/lawsuits/tro.html
(warning: not for those that prefer to niavely love our biz and it's "heroes")