Tag Archives: spam

ABC Search Affiliate Browser Hijack using abcjmp.com advertising

Posted on by
12

Update:  The malware seems to be hitting affiliates other than the ABCSearch, making a bit stronger their claim of innocence in matters relating to browser hijacking.

Still, it would seem to me that these problems would disappear if every affiliate relationship was defined by a *real, verified person* and then ad companies were required to identify (to authorities AND to the hijack victim) the recipient of any advertising revenue generated by the hijack.    This would put the pressure on the hijackers, not the victims.

NOTE:  It’s not yet clear to me the indirect role that ABCSEARCH plays in this frustrating equation of a browser hijacking redirecting to ABC advertisers.   It would seem they could police this activity better (as I think Google does with their adsense program).

I’m now struggling to remove a browser hijack routine where a spam affiiliate of ABCSEARCH is forwarding me to unwanted websites.    I’m furious with ABCSEARCH for failing to provide me with *any* helpful information, most importantly the identification of the affiliate who is the recipient of this fake search traffic.    ABC benefits from unwanted advertising and to some extent from this illegal activity and therefore is reluctant to lift the veil of secrecy that helps protect purveyors of unwanted advertising.  That is outrageous of them.

(I’m on a Vaio Desktop running Windows XP)

I found the info (below)indicating many others have had similar problems with the ABC advertising network.      Obviously they don’t directly support spammers but they *indirectly* support them by making it difficult to track down the offenders, some of whom are actually selling programs online that use a combination of infecting the computers with a browser hijack and ABC search ads.

When I figure out how to remove this ABCJMP ABCSEARCH spamming malware routine I’ll post it here.  In the meantime please let me know if you have the same problem.

What is abcjmp.com

Abcjmp.com is owned and operated by ABCSearch.com, the world’s largest privately held pay per click advertising network. Advertisers come to ABCSearch to distribute their ads across our broad network of search partners and content sites. Abcjmp.com is used as our network referral ID to identify and qualify traffic sent by our traffic partners.

Why am I seeing abcjmp.com on my computer?

Because ABCSearch is comprised up of a network of thousands of traffic partners, one of these partners may have included you into their distribution network. If you have received any advertisements that contain the url abcjmp.com, it is important to understand that ABCSearch.com and the advertiser are not directly responsible for the advertisement you received through our partner distribution that contains the advertisement with abcjmp.com in the domain name.

For Help

It is a high priority of ABCSearch.com and our advertisers to ensure a positive user experience. If you feel you have been receiving unwanted advertising through a distribution partner, please contact us with as much of the following information as possible: your IP address (http://www.whatismyip.com/), the full URL string with abcjmp.com ie:http://www.abcjmp.com/search/?affiliate=index0001&Terms=shoes&x=0&y=0, screenshots, and any other details you can share about your experience. With this information we can assist in getting you removed from the publisher’s distribution. However, because we do not control any part of the publisher’s process, we do not guarantee results. If the publisher uses advertisements supplied by ABCSearch.com’s advertising clients, we can try additional means to contact them and resolve any opt-out requests provided. Please send all correspondences to support@abcsearch.com and we will do our best to assist you.

Thank you,
The ABCSearch Team

Spamming down?

Posted on by
5

Wired is reporting that according to Google the total amount of email spam is going down.  (Thanks to Metroknow for the tip) .

This should be great news for many but it doesn’t really jive with my personal experience. My Google gmail spam box now gets on the order of a spam email every *minute*, 24/7 -(I need to check but I think I’m in the neighborhood of a thousand per day or close to it).   I get another several hundred per day that pass the filter, though I thin, this is partly the challenge of having some old email addresses that I don’t want to close down.   Generally, the older the address the more spam lists it winds up on.   I’m even having some issues at my Godaddy server with SMTP relays of the swirl of daily spam messages.

Update thought inspired by FG’s comment below:

I is possible that filtering has reached a point of diminishing return because at the level of tens of millions of emails the cost to send them is no longer trivial.

I’m guessing at these numbers: Let’s assume Google and other filters can kill off 9990 out of 10000 spams initially sent, and users then ignore 9 out of the remaining 10. Thus the spammer must send 10,000 to get one read. If the action on that one is 1 in 100 then it is going to take 100 x 10,000 = a million spam notes to get a single sale. At that level the bandwidth and time are no longer trivial costs, though they are still small.