For the past 18 months, McAfee Labs has been investigating a pay-per-install developer, WakeNet AB, responsible for spreading prevalent adware such as Adware-Wajam and Linkury. This developer has been active for almost 20 years and recently has used increasingly deceptive techniques to convince users to execute its installers. Our report is now available online.
During a 10-month period from September 2017 to June 2018, we observed more than 1.9 million detections in the wild and the generation of thousands of unique websites and URLs. McAfee product protections prevented millions of pieces of adware from being installed on customers’ machines.
McAfee Adware-InstCap detections from September 2017 to June 2018.
Some of the deceptive tactics we observed included fake movie playbacks and fake torrent downloads targeting both Windows and Mac systems. These tactics aimed to trick users into installing bundled applications such as performance cleaners.
WakeNet AB’s FileCapital tools are responsible for installing some of the most prevalent potentially unwanted program (PUP) families, which plague infected clients with unwanted advertisements and seriously impact performance.
The revenue WakeNet AB generated in one year puts it above some of the most prevalent ransomware families, which explains why creating PUPs is so appealing. PUP developers generate revenue primarily by exploiting PC users.
PUPs
A PUP is software that might offer some useful functionality to a customer but also presents some risk. Users see some PUPs as benign, others as malicious. One of the latter is Adware-Elex (aka Fireball), which infected 250 million devices. McAfee strives to protect its customers against all kinds of threats, including PUPs.
The McAfee PUP Policy helps users understand what is being installed on their systems and notifies them when a technology poses a risk to their systems or privacy. PUP detection and removal provides notification to our customers when a software program or technology lacks sufficient notification or control over the software, or fails to adequately gain user consent to the risks posed by the technology. For more on how McAfee defines and protects against PUPs, read the McAfee® Potentially Unwanted Programs Policy.
For a full analysis of WakeNet AB’s products, download the full report.
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