A small investigation of crack sites

Hello,

lately looking for sites to distribute my own releases I did some searching and noticed that an increasing number of crack sites are using cracks only to attract people in an attempt to have them download/install a series of spyware and adware apps.

At the moment I notice the following behaviors:

- download of an exe immediately started (usually recognizable by names such as readme.exe or download_plugin.exe)
- installation of a IE plugin requested
- executable added to the zip/rar (when run it will download a bunch of spyware and adware on the client machine)

Some sites however distinguish themselves for not doing anything of the above. At most they simply have annoying pop-ups.
Among these probably the best are keygen.us and mscracks.com that seem to be the most correct. Also, pinging all the sites that have proved to be more reliable it seems that they are all hosted in the same class C of IP addresses (and probably by the same host). In fact a few even share the same IP address.

Anyhow, I was wondering what do crack sites gain from spreading spyware and adware apps?


yaa