Incidents

FTC Issues "Tax" on Cyber-Crime

All about spyware

By Alexandru Dumitru, Security News Editor

2nd of October 2007, 08:45 GMT

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Three men that infected more than 15 million computers with spyware are going to pay $330.000 in ill-gotten gains. They've made huge profits from their scam, about $3.5 million. The fine, less than 10% of their financial gains isn't going to affect them quite a lot.

However, the good part is that the Media Motor scam has been finally halted. The settlement will bar the defendants from downloading software onto consumers' computers without disclosing its function and obtaining consumers' consent prior to installation, from downloading software that interferes with consumers' computer use, and it also bars false or misleading claims.

So, what was their software all about? Well, it was a standard-issue Trojan downloader. After it got into a user's computer (being hidden in another software that you could download from the web) it started downloading more malware. Once the virus had infected a PC it changed the consumers' home pages, tracked their Internet activity, altered browser settings, degraded computer performance, and disabled anti-spyware and anti-virus software. Also porno pop-ups would show up.

The worst part of this issue is the way it worked. You would get the program with the virus hidden in it and a normal installation window would pop-up. All normal up to here, but the "ugly" thing is that no matter if you chose to install the program or not, you were still getting the virus! Good thing they've stopped this operation!

It's great to see that these guys go down, and the best thing isn't that a small gang of web-scammers has been taken down. This is just a small thing. The great part about this is the impact that this is going to have on the cyber-criminal world. Not that all crooks who have their activity based on the web are going to fear the FTC and stop whatever they were doing, but it's still bound to affect a few.

TAGS:

FTC | fine | spyware

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