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October 26, 2005
Eurobarre - what is it?
There are a couple of reports on the net from people receiving spam which advertises a thing called "Eurobarre". The "Eurobarre" spams promise money for just surfing the net.
In Romanian, the text of the spammed e-mails looks like this:
Da click pe urmatorul site pt. a face bani pe internet usor!
http://www.eurobarre.com/index_fr.php?p=4734...
Fa bani acum instaland si tinand programul in tray ( din traficul tau facut pe internet ) sau raspandindu-l printre prietenii tai sau cu ajutorul siteului tau. Site-ul precizat mai sus este in limba franceza ... daca nu stiti franceza cumva folositi urmatorul translator: http://babelfish.altavista.com/tr
IMPORTANT: Acest program nu este un virus !!! Puteti sa il descarcati cu incredere si nu o sa va para rau! Compania va trimite banii chiar si in Romania garantat! Tine cont ca mii de romani fac asta zilnic si isi fac ceva bani frumosi fara nici un fel de efort!
Va Multumim!
Most of the time, the mails come in French but there are also English versions. By going to the website eurobarre.com, you can choose to install the "Eurobarre". First, you get a small downloader from their website, which further downloads the application itself, as a ZIP archive. It also fetches a "pkunzjr.com", a small DOS-based ZIP unpacker. During the installation, you are asked a couple basic deatils about yourself, including an e-mail address. Once installed, the Eurobarre looks like the following:
Desktop icon:
While active:
Main dialog open:
The application fetches random banners and displays them in the top frame while active. Except for that, it doesn't seem to be doing anything fishy, such as extracting information from your PC or capturing keystrokes or other spyware-related activity, but the main component is large (it is written in Visual Basic) and I haven't fully analyzed it yet. At best, it can be called Adware, but of course, it may have other hidden properties.
In all cases, it is always best to stay away from such programs, no matter the goods (==money) they promise. And if you need money, clicking banners on the Internet is certainly NOT the solution.
Posted by Costin Raiu at October 26, 2005 3:17 PM
Comments
I receive about 5 a day.
Whoever these guys are, they have quite a network. They are sending me emails to an address hidden pretty deep in the avira.com webpages :)
So, they have crawlers ... pretty good ones, I guess.
Well, we detect them as spam. ;)
Posted by: Sorin 
at October 27, 2005 11:10 AM
Eurobarre is harmless. It's one of those surfbars that you can earn money with, by having it open while you're online.
The spam you have received doesn't seem to be from eurobarre.com itself, but from someone that signed up there and now is looking for referrals (notice the ID number in the URL).
I currently have this surfbar installed myself (my screen resolution is big enough so I don't mind). There is no need to click the banners. The only security problem I could imagine is that it's using the IE-engine with ActiveX to display the banners, but I did some checks with anti-spyware tools and never got any problem so far. I guess Eurobarre choose their banner-partners wisely.
I started this January and made €3.93 till now without referrals. It's laughable, but I guess the guy who sends out the spam mails must be doing much better.
Posted by: tappatappa at May 28, 2006 10:15 AM