Researcher Accuses Sears of Spreading Spyware
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A Harvard researcher is criticizing Sears of failing to meet FTC guidelines with marketing software it installs on users' PCs.
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By JAMES COATES, CHICAGO TRIBUNE  Q. I am at my wits' end with my two sons' IBM laptop computers that are riddled with spyware and viruses to the extent that the computers are almost unusable.
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Console maker accused of fraud, accuses bank of misrepresentation
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Retailer Sears, Roebuck & Co has been hit with a lawsuit seeking class-action status that alleges a company Web site compromises customers' private information.
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The Federal Trade Commission is going after spyware, bits of computer code that install themselves on the computers of Internet users to track or disrupt their online activities.
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Federal authorities have asked a federal judge to shut down an operation that they said installed intrusive "spyware" on people's computers and then sold anti-spyware software to those same victims, a top consumer protection official said Tuesday.
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Companies are accused of infecting PCs, and then selling spyware-blocking software.
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Home net hardware could come under attack from malicious hackers, say security researchers
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Raising the fine line US consumer watchdog the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is calling for a bigger stick with which to punish spyware purveyors.â¦
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Confilct arises over a bundled tool that redirects Dell PC users who mistype URLs to a Dell-branded page of Google ads.
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The man at the center of the nation's first spyware case &#151; a businessman notorious for his junk Internet mailings &#151; says federal regulators were politically motivated in targeting him for enforcement of new bills outlawing intrusive software.
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Wal-Mart amasses more data about the products it sells and its shoppers' buying habits than anyone else, and some privacy advocates worry about the potential for abuse.
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For millions of PC users, the privacy-snatching programs known as spyware have been nothing but a headache as they swipe personal information, slow systems to a crawl and crash computers.
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Microsoft is moving to counter some scathing comments regarding a security paper authored by researchers at its Cambridge, England, facility.The paper, &quot;Sampling Strategies for Epidemic-Style Information Dissemination,&quot; looks at how worms sometimes inefficiently spread their code.The research explores how a more efficient method could, for example, be used for distributing patches or other software. The advantage would be that patches could be distributed from PC to PC, rather than from a central server.That method would reduce the load on a server, and patches would be distributed faster. But the patches would have the same qualities as a computer worm, a generally malicious file.Since a story about the paper appeared on Thursday in the New Scientist magazine, the paper has been roundly assailed.&quot;This is a stupid idea,&quot; wrote Bruce Schneier, a security expert, author and CTO of Mountain View, Calif.-based enterprise security vendor BT Counterpane, on Tuesday, before quoting a passage from the New Scientist story on his blog.Schneier wrote that the idea of so-called &quot;benevolent worms&quot; comes up every few years.However, a worm is designed to run without the consent of a user, which doesn&#39;t make it a good method of software distribution, Schneier wrote. The worm patching technique could also make the patches hard to uninstall or interrupt during installation, he wrote.Worms designed to distribute software patches could also be hacked to distribute malicious software, wrote Randy Abrams, director of education for security vendor Eset, in his regular e-mail commentary.Forced patching is also troublesome since some patches may not be compatible with critical software, Abrams wrote.&quot;Breaking into computers is a bad idea,&quot; Abrams said.A Microsoft spokesman said on Monday that the New Scientist story is not inaccurate. However, the writer of the story &quot;sexed&quot; up the research paper a bit, particularly with the headline that used the phrase &quot;friendly worms,&quot; the spokesman said.In response to the criticism, Microsoft said it doesn&#39;t intend to develop patch worms.&quot;This was not the primary scenario targeted for this research,&quot; according to a statement.The company also said it will continue to let customers decide how and when they apply security updates.One of the paper&#39;s authors, Milan Vojnovic, said in a statement that there were no plans to incorporate the ideas into Microsoft&#39;s products. Efforts to reach Vojnovic for comment were unsuccessful.
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Hackers get what they want Sears Roebuck and Co. is taking more flack from privacy advocates who say the retailer's websites don't adequately protect customer privacy.â¦
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Copycats are keeping busy. Security researcher says the Net threat's source code is "hot stuff."
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A study of home PCs released on Monday found that about 80 percent had been infected with spyware almost entirely unbeknownst to their users.