Russian Business will Pay to Spread Spyware

An online business based in Russia will pay websites 6 US cents for each machine they infect with adware and spyware, security researchers said this week, calling the practice "awful". iframeDOLLARS.biz, which according to a WHOIS lookup is registered to a Nick Fedorov in Nizhny Novgorod, a Russian city on the Volga about 240 miles east of Moscow, will pay Webmasters to place a one-line exploit on their sites. The code exploits a number of patched Windows and Internet Explorer vulnerabilities, including some that go back as far as 2002. Systems that haven't been updated, however, would still be vulnerable to the exploit. According to analysis done by the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center, the exploit drops at least nine pieces of malicious code, including backdoors, other Trojans, spyware, and adware, on any PC whose user surfs to a site hosting the exploit code. iframeDOLLARS says it pays US$61 per thousand unique installs, or 6.1 US cents per compromised machine, to any site that signs up as an affiliate.