How Did That Porn Program Get There?

Members of the ISP-Tech list share the many ways that porn programs, such as the britneyspearsnude.exe backdoor, can land on a subscriber's computer. Some of them don't even involve surfing porn sites.

[November 15, 2001]

On the ISP-Tech list in October, HS queried,

"Had a customer call who's running Windows Me. Somehow he had an icon that just appeared on his desktop called 'See Celebrities Nude.' The file was located under C:\Windows\Program Files\Dialer, called britneyspearsnude.exe. Anybody know what this is?"

A number of respondents observed that it's a common issue:

[AM offered] "My guess is that it's a dialer program. They charge unknowing users exorbitant amounts of money by dialing an international number to connect them to the Internet. They're online, but they're unknowingly paying some huge fee per minute. I'd have them unplug their modem until they fix it, just to be safe."

[AN agreed] "We've had customers with similar problems, and they've all turned out to be DUN entries that called 900 numbers or long distance numbers. Deleting the file has always cured the problem."

[TM advised] "He might want to check his phone bill as well: the costs will be very high."

Others suggested that this is clearly an active porn surfer:

[AN scoffed] "Damn, don't you just hate it when porn 'appears'? It's magical!"

[MS advised] "Tell him to stop surfing porn sites: he must have accepted the download, not knowing it was a dialer program."

[TD agreed] "It sounds like your customer does a lot of porn surfing. Some of the sites give you an opportunity to download a dialup connection that lets them access a site with movies."

JT disagreed, suggesting that porn spam can come from random sources:

"You don't have to surf porn sites to get e-mail porn. Many porn spammers get addresses from just about anywhere."

—End