50 people smarter than you

yes most affiliate scams work like this..

altering the hosts file of a sponsor domain to the scam domain that just refreshes back to the original link but with the scam code in place

You can bet its comming...

If Rick is aware of it...

Its definatly comming.

This is one them sort of threads some people wish would go away, however I am sure this kind of issue will perpetually continue.

the ones i was referring to were the ones that disect the html of a page and search and replace affililiate code on the fly. these can be stopped by masking the url with any number of methods

In about four months more than have the scumware apps will stop working on the PCs. Wait and see.

it would seem that a whole new infrastructure on how hits are tracked and recorded will need to be put in place????

This is prob true , but in 4 months the amount of new scumware will increase 4 fold resulting in an increase :)

That's one of many methods for sure. As a webmaster you should spend your time protecting yourself from some of the more common techniques used like banner replacements. Just change your banner sizes by one off like 467x59, etc.

Make a list of what you would do if you were a criminal and do whatever you can to protect yourself. We have someone that spends most of their day on these things.

Also probably true. We do what we can.

The sad thing is that this kinda thing can not be fought by a starting, struggling webmaster.

They can not be expected to know how to combat it.

Most webmasters when actually working are in solitude as the best secrets are self learned and seldomly tought.

This kinda thing ruins the small guys in a big way.

If you don't make sales you don't grow and your work fills someone elses pocket as they use some cheap shot code.

Who wants to call that "Smart" marketing.
Its fucken outright theft.

The solution is to switch to linux / freebsd EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Let me know when you can part water...

no, high quality! that wont work!!!

why dont you go to that parade tonight and shuddup!


lol

That wouldn't help at all. It's the end users we are talking about.

I've been thinking about this stuff for months now, wondering how 2 stop it.

This was my sad attempt at the cliche NERD argument.

heh

Gotcha

Why it was very sad...

You should know who you do business with...

http://www.ialien.com/biz.gif

Its very easy to spoof the referring url to a page with a link containing the ref code of the hijacker. :2 cents:

By the way, the same ref spoof techique is used by plug-in stealers to bypass security there. zspoof and the like.

Rick - I swear to Jebus that I'm not using any of this scumware or cheating in any way, but I am pretty knowledgable in network enabled client side windoze code, and have knowledge of specific working examples of this kind of client-side hijacker. Let me know if there is any way I can help the war.

This affects mostly affiliates right? Is it possible for people to steal a join from the program itself? I would think that would be kind of hard if the sponsor pays out the affiliates him or herself. That would be totally crazy if someone could divert a join at the affiliate program level and have the join go to a different master account at the biller. I'm assuming affiliates are much more vernable to getting hijacked than the affiliate program is. What's good about affiliate software is you can monitor join form fill outs, so I would imagine that would help shed light on some things if the program was getting ripped off. Either way it sucks because affiliates are the backbone of any program, and once they loose revenue we all loose revenue.
Cheers,
Duke Skywalker

I have not used it, but if you try it would post the results

its the new style... 4 and 3 and 2 and 1

Exactly. Cookies are also vulnerable because of this. However, the worst are trojans that act like one aspect of Gator.:BangBang:

That affiliatelinkcloaker looks slightly interesting, but why not just use tinyurl.com ?? It does pretty much the exact same thing for free.

-P