Who is the victim here?

180solutions clams to be the victim of cybergangs in this story at CNET. 180solutions says they were one of the victims of the so-called "bot herders" arrested by Dutch police in October. One of the three men arrested was a 180solutions distributor, according to Sean Sundwall's quote.

"We shut him off and he asked to be reinstated," Sundwall said. When he was not, the individual threatened with a denial of service attack unless 180solutions paid him an undisclosed sum. "The attack ensued in early August and that is when we involved the FBI," Sundwall said.

InformationWeek's story has more details.

"When this guy signed up, he had a gaming site and was delivering [our software] to his customers," explained Sundwall. "But at some point he turned to the dark side, and created or leveraged this botnet and started distributing our software via that means."

I find the timing of this revelation interesting following the report of 180's software being installed through the AIM worm along with a rootkit and backdoor. Richard Stiennon of anti-spyware company Webroot comments:

[...] companies like 180solutions could be doing more to prevent renegades like the Dutch operation. "180solutions has said it will shut off the money to these types by the end of the year," Stiennon said. "But why don't they shut them off immediately?"

Why, indeed?

Sunbeltblog has a screenshot today of a 180solutions download at a known CoolWebSearch site.  (Click the link for CWS alpha sort in text format.) Nice distribution partners, those CoolWebSearch folks. CWS is known for all kinds of very nasty spyware tricks and hijacks, delivered from porn sites and worse.  But, since 180solutions is waiting until the end of the year to shut down those types, I suppose we just might see more screenshots like this one. Surely 180 has the ability to shut down naughly affiliates quickly, just like they did the Dutchman who turned on them. 180solutions may be a victim, but they are not getting any sympathy from the commenters at CNET.

Whoa!  I just got a news alert about another naughty 180solutions affiliate. From Wired:

In the first U.S. prosecution of its kind, FBI agents arrested a 20-year-old Los Angeles man Thursday on charges that he cracked some 400,000 Windows machines and covertly installed pop-up-generating adware on them, in a scheme that allegedly brought in $60,000 in ill-gotten profits.

Jeanson Ancheta faces a 17-count federal indictment charging him with two counts of conspiracy and various forms of computer intrusion and money laundering. The government is also seeking the seizure of more than $60,000 in cash, a used BMW and some computer equipment from the alleged hacker.

Wow!