Quote:
Originally Posted by Jon Clark
But what can we really do about it....?
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IMO, spyware is the biggest threat to affiliates more so than anything else.
Like the orginal post stated, the sponsors still make their money, it's the affiliate that gets fucked.
We need a group of people to work on this 24/7. At very least the trojans should be identified as well as the sites using them. We try to work with all the major antivirus companies to include fixes for these trojans in their next update. We educate ourselves as much as possible. We only trade / buy from people we know or people that are reputable.
We need to put pressure on affiliate programs to do something about this. It really shouldn't be that hard. These affiliate accounts should be over written within a matter of seconds of your affiliate code being set.
For example. my page loads, my cookie is set, you have this trojan on your PC, it detects my affiliate program, and over writes my code, all in a matter of seconds. Now the affiliate company has all the data. They know your ip was set for my affiliate account and they know that "x" seconds later your ip was set again to another affiliate account. If two affiliate codes are set within say 5 mins from the same ip, the second account being set should be flagged. If it gets "x" amount of flags then the affiliate company needs to look into. This should be pretty easy to set up, if they see account "XYZ" is setting a cookie less than 5 mins after someone else 90% of the time than they know there is a serious problem with that account. I would have to think that a surfer clicking your account, than clicking someone else's account with in minutes would only happen a low percentage of the the time.
The trojan fucks can't beat this, if they wait too long to overwrite your cookie then they risk that person signing up through your account before they set theirs. So they have to do it pretty quick, in most cases i bet it happens in a matter of a couple seconds. I am suggesting 5 mins as an example, it could be reduced to shorter period of time.
The part i mentioned above about forming a group is critical. Unless someone is getting paid full time to do the work on behalf, we will never accomplish anything. We are all busy and have things to deal with, it will just be a lose collection of people trying to give an hour here or an hour there. That isn't going to cut it. How about a group with monthly fees of say $50 per person, and $500 per an affiliate company. (EXAMPLES) We hire someone who is very well qualified in spyware to work on this full time. The more people anti up and step up to the plate the more resources we can obtain.