Don Marti

Tue 26 May 2015 06:57:36 PM PDT

Hey, kids, let's play Adtech or Malware!

It's time to play "Adtech or Malware?"

For each of the following Fair Use news excerpts, can you figure out if it's from a story on recently discovered malware, or from a story on a new advertising technology? Answers at the end.

1

If "a person with a smartphone takes the metro, a/an (Adtech or malware?) application" uses accelerometer readings to trace the person, to infer where the (victim/consumer) gets on and oﬀ the train. They said that "metro trains run on tracks, making their motion patterns distinguishable from cars or buses running on ordinary roads."

2

It detects your actual address and uses it to scrape and gather all the data associated with where you live. The application is so powerful, say (adtech developers or malware researchers?) that it can know when you’re at home or away.

3

Once users enable the macro content, it creates a VBScript, a batch file and other files around the version of Windows (victims or consumers?) are running, (security researcher or adtech analyst?) said. The files then download the (ad or malware?) payload and a “statistics image” from a public picture-hosting service. The (malware writer or ad agency?) can then see how many times the image was downloaded.

4

This looks like a real site (except for those weird empty scrollbar windows; not sure what's up with those...). It has very professional text content, not the normal randomly-scraped junk that often populates sites being used for Search Engine Poisoning attacks -- and that's because this network isn't doing SEP.

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