MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – One of the enduring truisms of internet marketing is that any technology, platform or medium which can be used for legitimate communications and advertising can also be used for nefarious, criminal purposes.

Throughout the history of the commercial internet, we’ve seen this fact underlined again and again, from email spamming and SMS-bashed phishing to malicious apps and “fake news” campaigns on social media.

One of the more frustrating aspects of this longstanding truth is that when cybercriminals set their hooks, quite often the bait they use is porn – leading a lot of people to assume, understandably, the criminals targeting them are part of the adult industry.

Take the news surrounding the recently identified app-based exploit “Adult Swine,” for example. According to the Check Point researchers who identified the malicious code in approximately 60 apps in the Google Play Store, the apps “wreak havoc in three possible ways.”

First, the apps display ads which are “often highly inappropriate and pornographic” – which might not be as big a problem if the apps targeted adult users, but these affected apps are largely games which are popular with children.

Second, the apps try to trick the user in to installing bogus “security apps,” which only further the exploitation of the device, if the user falls for the trap. For their third trick, the apps try to induce users into registering for “premium services at the user’s expense.”

Ultimately, the cybercriminals’ goal in distributing these apps likely have less to do with displaying inappropriate ads (although I’m sure there’s some money in doing so) than with leveraging access to users’ devices to “broaden its goals to other purposes, such as credential theft,” as Check Point puts it.

From a security standpoint, an app which prompts the user to download bogus security apps in furtherance of stealing the user’s credentials is a bigger concern than the display of inappropriate and pornographic ads. The fact these malicious apps are cloaked in the cover of being games for children, however, renders the pornographic aspect the headline-winner, so to speak.

As noted by the Check Point researchers though, to think of the inappropriate ads as the most problematic thing about such malicious apps would be a mistake.

“Although for now this malicious app seems to be a nasty nuisance, and most certainly damaging on both an emotional and financial level, it nevertheless also has a potentially much wider range of malicious activities that it can pursue, all relying on the same common concept,” the Check Point researchers wrote.

From an adult industry perspective, an ancillary problem with such apps is that they help foster the notion the legitimate adult entertainment industry is somehow involved with, or responsible for, such exploits. “There goes the porn industry again,” some will inevitably think “worming its way into an app store which won’t allow it to be there openly – and targeting children to do it!”

Nothing I’ve seen written or said about these apps suggests there’s any evidence of the adult industry being involved in them – and as a practical matter, there’s no way to stop a third-party from linking any sort of material to your site, regardless of whether the perpetrators are being compensated for the traffic or sales such linking might produce.

Complicating the public relations component of this even further, of course, is the reputation the industry earned for itself over the years, by being spam-tolerant in pursuit of sales, or through aggressive cross-selling, or any number of other marketing shortsighted marketing tactics which have undeniably been a part of the industry over the years.

Not every company or individual entrepreneur engaged in such things, of course, but enough did to sully the collective reputation of the online porn industry in a deep, fundamental way. At a certain point, from the consumers’ perspective, it’s almost irrelevant if you personally engaged in unethical activity; you are guilty by association, smeared with the enduring stain of your peers’ actions, regardless of whether you took part in the same.

So long as porn is popular, there will be those who use it as bait in their nefarious schemes – and every time there comes along a new way to distribute porn, there will be scammers who jump on it immediately to further their crimes.

As an industry, all we can do is make it clear we don’t tolerate or participate in such exploits, decisively distance ourselves from those who do – and hope that our collective good behavior in the present will, in the eyes of consumers, eventually redeem the collective misbehavior in our past.

Image © Katia Grimmer-Laversanne