New Spyware Company In Town!
I stumbled across 'Golog' today in a clients affiliate program. The blurb immediately rang alarm bells as it sounded like a perfect spyware scam! In conjuncition with Jess at Affiliate Program Advice I have just taken over the program management and was surprised to find a spyware affiliate approved and actively making money. The program had previously been managed by a supposedly 'specialist agency'. This is just another lesson that there are too many cowboys attempting to run affiliate programs. In under 2 hours of taking over the program, we have tracked down this affiliate and stopped them in their tracks, we are now making this public to alert others to end the relationship!
So who are Golog? Whats the deal? In short Golog is working direct with ISPs. As a user you are given the WRONG DNS resolutions for domains that cannot be temporarily resolved, and instead resolve these domains with a VALID IP address redirect their users to a GOLOG server that will accept all HTTP connections, but will process the submitted URLs and data to find keywords andthenredirect them to advertising sponsor sites. It seems that they are using affiliate programs as the source for their advertising relationships. So if a domain is temporarily down, the effect will be that this domain will stay in the router's DNS relay cache, or in the PC's client DNS cache resolved with the IP address of the Golog server for at least one full day.
This technology gives users a falsified vision of the Internet. Acorrding to tech republic The other concern is also privacy: Golog servers have very bad privacy practices and this service admits that it shares the collected private data (which includes everything you could imagine being part of private data, including your name, address, phone, email, and complete internet usage profile) with any thirdparty of its choice (including but not limited to your ISP or its advertising sponsors).
Whats amazing is that this is spyware, but now supported by ISPs, it's pretending to help users and making them happy with such device!
Golog has already infected millions users in Europe and now starts focusing ISPs in US too, in order to steal traffic to large merchant sites that ARE paying to get this traffic: eBay, Amazon, MSN... and stealing revenues from legitimate small businesses that could be very easy to defeat with moderate DoS attacksagainst their primary DNS server.
For the full article visit: http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=5&threadID=188391&messageID=1943299
So who are Golog? Whats the deal? In short Golog is working direct with ISPs. As a user you are given the WRONG DNS resolutions for domains that cannot be temporarily resolved, and instead resolve these domains with a VALID IP address redirect their users to a GOLOG server that will accept all HTTP connections, but will process the submitted URLs and data to find keywords andthenredirect them to advertising sponsor sites. It seems that they are using affiliate programs as the source for their advertising relationships. So if a domain is temporarily down, the effect will be that this domain will stay in the router's DNS relay cache, or in the PC's client DNS cache resolved with the IP address of the Golog server for at least one full day.
This technology gives users a falsified vision of the Internet. Acorrding to tech republic The other concern is also privacy: Golog servers have very bad privacy practices and this service admits that it shares the collected private data (which includes everything you could imagine being part of private data, including your name, address, phone, email, and complete internet usage profile) with any thirdparty of its choice (including but not limited to your ISP or its advertising sponsors).
Whats amazing is that this is spyware, but now supported by ISPs, it's pretending to help users and making them happy with such device!
Golog has already infected millions users in Europe and now starts focusing ISPs in US too, in order to steal traffic to large merchant sites that ARE paying to get this traffic: eBay, Amazon, MSN... and stealing revenues from legitimate small businesses that could be very easy to defeat with moderate DoS attacksagainst their primary DNS server.
For the full article visit: http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=5&threadID=188391&messageID=1943299
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