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What could the most evil thing on the Internet and the Dalai Lama possibly have in common?
Both are being used to promote websites owned by two of the Internet's most notorious businessmen.
The Xupiter toolbar that is plaguing so many Internet users is the work of the father and son team of Saeid and Daniel Yomtobian. Both men are experienced in devising innovative ways to use the Internet to force their businesses down people's throats.
According to domain-name registration records, Xupiter.com is owned by a Hungarian company, but sources say that Xupiter's real owners are the Yomtobians, who reside in Sherman Oaks, California.
The Yomtobians are well-known spammers who have been accused of hijacking other peoples' mail servers to pump out solicitations for porn sites.
The pair is also skilled in setting up stealth websites and has spent much time in court for deliberately constructing URLs in a way that encourages people to arrive at one of their websites accidentally.
Users typically stumble on this scam when they enter a URL that's slightly incorrect and are whisked off to a gambling or sexually explicit site rather than the well-known domain they had intended to visit.
Court records indicate The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have both had their URLs co-opted by the Yomtobians.
Saeid Yomtobian owned 78,472 Internet domains when he threatened to sue VeriSign in July 2001, claiming that VeriSign software had deleted as many as 2,000 of the domain names that Yomtobian had registered. He sought $6.5 million in damages. The case seems to have been dropped, but Yomtobian now offers his own domain name registration service.
Yomtobian filed the case under his business, Yomtobian Enterprises. A search for Yomtobian Enterprises brings up yet another cavalcade of legal notices.
Content on the Yomtobian sites varies, covering topics ranging from sexual success training, interspecies romance, Internet advertising firms and even Tibetan children demanding the return of the Dalai Lama. Virtually all have one thing in common: On arrival, users are presented with an option to download the Xupiter toolbar.
Many people insist that Xupiter mugged their computers, installing itself without permission.
Some security experts say it's impossible for Xupiter to install itself sans users' approval on a computer, while others point to known flaws in older versions of Internet Explorer that allow malicious code on a website to be downloaded and executed automatically.
Users of the most recent versions of IE, and those who have patched older versions, should be safe from Xupiter auto-installs. But even the most up-to-date software may not be enough to save users from Xupiter's wrath.
Technical support representatives at Microsoft's help center said Xupiter is "breaking" some installed versions of Windows XP.
"It can actually break the entire system, making it impossible for you to open My Computer or other directories on the computer," claimed one rep, who requested anonymity. "It's worse than a minor inconvenience; it causes major issues with the system. We're getting a lot of requests for help with this."
The Yomtobians did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
There is no legal requirement for those who register a domain to give correct address or other contact information. Some take advantage of this loophole to hide their identities or to register dicey businesses in countries that do not have laws prohibiting activities that might attract legal attention elsewhere.
Hungarian legal experts said under current laws there wouldn't have been much that they could do about Xupiter. Residents of Hungary who read about Xupiter and offered to scout the company's location said they were unable to find the business at the address given in the domain registration information.
Lawyers say it's difficult to determine whether Xupiter is illegal in the United States.
"It's using existing problems in software, not creating them, so they could plead they didn't know the software could install itself," said criminal attorney Morris Felder. "But viruses use existing holes, too, and distributing them is illegal. You'd have to prove these Xupiter guys acted with malice."
Sneaky Toolbar Hijacks Browsers
Nigerian Net Scam, Version 3.0