Symantec sues vendors for $15M over piracy
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Symantec is suing a group of software vendors claiming they distributed several unauthorized versions of security and backup software, including Norton AntiVirus and Veritas Backup Exec.
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(InfoWorld) - Earlier this month the Business Software Alliance (BSA) upped the ante from $200,000 to $1 million for anyone who turns in a company that is illegally circumventing software licensing agreements. BSA members include a who's who of the software and hardware industry, including Apple, Adobe, Dell, HP, Microsoft, SAP, and dozens more. The bounty for uncovering cheaters is not just a marketing ploy. The Association can, in fact, put some bite into uncovering cheaters, according to Kris Barker, CEO of Express Metrix. Express Metrix is a company that does hardware and software auditing to help companies keep in compliance with their software licenses. "Most software licensing agreements include a provision that allows a software vendor or its agent, which can be the BSA, to do an audit of end-user agreements," said Barker. The BSA increased the reward as software piracy continues to grow. According to IDC, U.S. software vendors lost $7.3 billion in 2006 as a result of piracy. However, turning in the man or woman in the cubicle next to you is not how an informer can earn the top reward. The BSA has 22 terms and conditions that must be met before the $1 million payoff is awarded. The rewards are based on sums received in out-of-court settlements, which is the most common way a company avoids any more punitive prosecution for piracy. In order to earn the $1 million, a company would have to settle out of court with the BSA for anywhere between $10,000,001 to $15,000,000. The terms and conditions also state, that "no reward is payable unless the BSA pursues a case and, as a direct result of the information provided by you, receives a monetary payment from the reported organization." A far more modest reward, up to $5,000, is given to anyone whose information leads to a settlement of $15,000 to $100,000. Despite many restrictions, BSA says that since 2005, out-of-court settlements have totaled $22 million. Another requirement of the terms and conditions states that an employee who has installed unlicensed software is not eligible for a reward unless "you were directed by your supervisor to do so." The rewards are part of a larger BSA campaign, which is appropriately titled, "Blow the Whistle."
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A software developer whose program was accidentally labeled a threat is considering action against the antivirus company.
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WASHINGTON -- U.S. regulators said Tuesday that Sony BMG Music Entertainment agreed to reimburse consumers up to $150 for damage to their computers from CDs with hidden anti-piracy software.
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THE DEAL: Symantec Corp., best known for its Norton-branded software that fights computer viruses, is heading in a new direction with a $13.5 billion acquisition of data storage and backup specialist Veritas Software Corp.
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InfoWorld - It may have taken enterprise customers years to get proper security tools in place to defend their PCs, but if large businesses drag their feet in aligning the applications necessary to protect their smartphones, they will pay a heavy price, says Symantec.
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InfoWorld - Security vendor Kaspersky Lab has sued a Chinese antivirus software company for allegedly making false claims about Kasperky&#39;s products and business practices.
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About 40 patents owned by bankrupt software vendor Commerce OneÂ were auctioned for $15.5 million in a San Francisco bankruptcy court Monday.
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Security software company SymantecÂ is negotiating to buy storage software vendor Veritas SoftwareÂ for more than $13 billion, according to a report published Tuesday by The New York Times.
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The Motion Picture Association of America&#39;s war on piracy took an unexpected turn this week with a new lawsuit. This time, instead of targeting pirates directly the MPAA has sued two microchip makers, Sigma Designs, Inc.
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Meanwhile, back in the data centre... Symantec announced today it would cough up $830m for infrastructure management software firm Altiris.â¦
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A muscular appliance Red Hat last week continued its appliance assault via a partnership with Symantec.â¦
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Online auction giant eBay has been slow to respond to concerns about pirated software being sold there, prompting the Software &amp; Information Industry Association (SIIA)&#160;to file nine lawsuits against eBay-based software sellers, an SIIA official said.The SIIA believes it is necessary to file the lawsuits because eBay has been largely uncooperative in cracking down on software piracy, said Keith Kupferschmid, senior vice president of the trade group&#39;s antipiracy division.&quot;We haven&#39;t had very much success in getting [eBay] to work with us,&quot; he said.SIIA has asked eBay to stop &quot;buy it now&quot; and one-day auctions for software, but eBay has not complied, Kupferschmid said. In many cases, sellers offering pirated software are looking to sell it quickly, he said. SIIA also asked eBay if the trade group could buy banner advertisements warning about piracy when a user is looking at software, but the auction site declined, Kupferschmid added. &quot;We shouldn&#39;t have to do that,&quot; he said. &quot;eBay should do that themselves.&quot;Two eBay spokespeople didn&#39;t immediately respond to a request for comments on SIIA&#39;s position.The lawsuits, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, are the largest round the SIIA has filed since launching its auction-site antipiracy program two years ago, the trade group said in a news release. Seven of the lawsuits were filed Wednesday, the SIIA said. Two others were filed two weeks ago. Most of the lawsuits target eBay sellers of Abobe PhotoShop CS3; one of the lawsuits targets a seller of several Symantec software packages.The defendants are from Texas, California, Washington state, Illinois, and New Jersey.&quot;SIIA has declared war against those who continue to sell pirated software on auction sites such as eBay,&quot; Kupferschmid said. &quot;Our goal is to give illegal software sellers a rude awakening so that unsuspecting software buyers and legitimate sellers are protected. For too long, auction sellers have been able to sell pirated software while risking only the removal of their auction.&quot;Since launching its Auction Litigation Program about two years ago, SIIA has filed about 20 lawsuits, not including the nine from the last two weeks, Kupferschmid said. The SIIA has won about six of those lawsuits in court, but in every case, the lawsuits have resulted in the seller stopping unauthorized sales of software, he said.&quot;Ultimately, they have stopped selling the illegal software, and that&#39;s what we&#39;re trying to do here,&quot; he said.
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Chinese users whose PCs were crippled by a faulty virus update are suing Symantec for damages.
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During a weeklong period in mid-November, security experts with Symantec observed roughly 65,000 new applications being downloaded onto the computers of customers participating in a new research project -- based on their analysis of the software, as many as 60 percent of the programs were malicious.The involved timeframe represented a relative high point for the percentage of unknown applications being downloaded by Symantec's project participants, and the basis for the company's assessment of the programs as malicious was predicated largely on the programs' use of obfuscated naming conventions.However, the numbers point to a disturbing trend that the researchers say may force the security company to change its fundamental approach for warding off threats -- that being that the number of malicious applications coming to life on the Web appears to be outpacing the volume of legitimate programs.With malware authors using fuzzing tools to find holes in popular applications such as Web browsers, and testing their work against commercial anti-virus (AV) products to ensure that the attacks evade detection by the tools, leading researchers at Symantec admit that defending against threats using traditional methods has become something of a losing battle."The reality is that most new malware is going undetected by commercial security products, and not just Symantec's, but we have to recognize that like all other AV products we are probably missing a sizeable amount of this malware," said Carey Nachenberg, a member of the company's Security Response team who also wears the title of Symantec Fellow."Eventually we write [virus] signatures and get those out to customers, but it appears that a sizeable proportion of this malware never gets detected," he said. "Instead of distributing one copy of each malware program to thousands of people, they're producing a copy for as few as two or three people and then re-writing it; so, if we get one version we can remove it from a few computers, but not all the variants. The problem with this is that there is the potential over time for almost everyone to have some form of infestation, maybe in only a few years time."The trend toward malware authors using small runs of attacks to evade detection and hook as many victims as possible, known as server-side polymorphism, is forcing Symantec to reassess how it goes about protecting its users.Since it can't hope to keep up with every flavor of threat that is being created, traditional countermeasures such as the use of malware signatures or behavioral heuristics will need to be augmented with new tactics, Nachenberg said.One such alternative is the use of the same distributed data collection capabilities that Symantec is using to track the proliferation of malware. By creating a system of file and Web site reputation by studying applications usage patterns among its customers, the researcher said, Symantec hopes to use a community approach to help people determine which programs they decide to use, or avoid.Much as many people turn to the reviews section on Amazon.com or the buyer feedback system on eBay to get a real-world take on products before they decide to buy, Nachenberg contends that by watching how people are using various applications the security vendor can use a process of elimination for weeding out malware from legitimate software.If only a few people among the millions of Symantec customers who could contribute usage data to such a program were utilizing some application in question, it would be prudent to recommend that people avoid the program until its nature has been better determined, he said.Using opt-out tools that provide anonymous feedback on applications that were built into Symantec's existing Norton AntiVirus and Internet Security 2008 products, the company is already gathering the type of data necessary to create such a system of recommendation."Right now this is just a long-term research project, but we hope that as we get more users involved in the system, we can truly get a better idea of what is on people's computers so that we can identify malicious software based on the demographics of who is using it, versus what it does," Nachenberg said. "We're hoping to get more clarity through the large base of users we have; by collecting this data we should be able to get the most comprehensive view of the usage patterns to derive reputation information for everything they use."Faced with questions over potential privacy issues driven by Symantec's ability to watch just who is using what applications and how, the researcher reiterated that users must be made aware of the data collection, allowed to opt-out, and guaranteed that all the information aggregation is done in an anonymous fashion.By offering users the ability to decide whether or not to use an application based on demographics, versus simply blocking programs based on its own observations, the company will also give people more freedom to determine what tools they feel are appropriate to use, he said."If we know that only five people are using a program, given the tens of millions of users we ultimately hope to have in the system, we can be totally objective and recommend that people wait until it is scrutinized further before using it," the researcher said. "We will need to have some manual process for white-listing programs as well, but we think that using this approach we can deliver a reasonable amount of quality with a low false positive rate."If the volume of new malware strains arriving on the Web continues to outpace the proliferation of legitimate programs, Nachenberg said that AV vendors including Symantec may need to move to a white-listing approach in general, and focus more attention on identifying good applications instead of trying to chase down all the bad."If there is less software to analyze that is good, it makes more sense to spend our time scanning for good programs and simply telling our users to avoid everything else," he said. "We're considering models where we can produce the world's largest up-to-date white list of software, but it's not something we can put together in a year; maybe in two-to-three years time."
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A month after Symantec knocked out 50,000 Chinese PCs with bad software, the company is offering compensation.
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As part of its fight against software piracy, Microsoft has filed lawsuits against eight resellers for allegedly buying and selling fake and used Certificate of Authenticity labels, the company says.