Ex-employee: Spyware maker used Rochester club
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The longtime general manager of a defunct city nightclub says his former boss is not telling the truth about the clubâs role in a computer spyware operation.
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(InfoWorld) - Washington's attorney general has settled the first case prosecuted under the state's 2005 Computer Spyware Act. The settlement. announced Monday, is with antispyware vendor Secure Computer LLC. The White Plains, New York, software companyÂ was accused of marketing its product via deceptive spam and pop-up ads, which offered free spyware scans that always detected a problem with the computer that was scanned. The company and its president, Paul Burke, will pay $725,000 in legal fees and $200,000 in penalties, and will reimburse Washington state customers $75,000, said Paula Selis, senior council with the attorney general's office. "Given the scope of the defendants' practices and the amount of consumer harm out there, we feel this is a very fair settlement." More than 1,100 state residents purchased the company's Spyware Cleaner software since it went on the market in 2004, Selis said. Those customers will now be e-mailed by Secure Computer and offered a refund for the $49.95 product, under terms of the settlement. Secure Computer, which admits no wrongdoing in the matter, is also prohibited from usingÂ deceptive marketing techniquesÂ to promote its software, and the company must now review the advertising of its marketing affiliates to make sure they comply with the settlement. That seems like an unlikely possibility, however, because Spyware Cleaner was pulled from the market shortly after the lawsuits were filed in late January, and Secure Computer LLC is now out of business, according to the company's Web site. Representatives from Secure Computer could not be reached for comment. Secure Computer and four of its business partners were sued by Microsoft and the Washington attorney general in January, but charges against three of the men have already been settled. A fourth man, Manoj Kumar of Maharashtra, India, could not be located, the attorney general's office said. Â
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A former top executive of the company that runs the Monster job search website admitted in court yesterday that he illegally backdated millions of dollars in employee stock-option grants -- a practice that cheats shareholders.
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Federal attorneys are trying to shut down an allegedly illicit Internet business operated out of a dance club in Rochester that is deluging computers with unwanted pop-up ads by hijacking their browsers.
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Not bad take for three days work A former computer consultant has admitted to breaking in to more than 60 business kiosks at hotels and stealing credit card information during a three-day crime spree earlier this year.â¦
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Sears and Kmart customers who sign up for a new marketing program may be giving up more private information than they&#39;d bargained for, a prominent anti-spyware researcher claims.According to Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Ben Edelman, Sears Holdings&#39; My SHC Community program falls short of U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) standards by failing to notify users exactly what happens when they download the company&#39;s marketing software.And given the invasive nature of the product, Sears has an obligation to make its behavior clearer to users. &quot;The software is not something you&#39;d want on your computer or the computer of anyone you care about,&quot; Edelman said in an interview. &quot;It tracks every site you go to, every search you make, every product you buy, and every product you look at but don&#39;t buy. It&#39;s just spooky.&quot;Edelman has written up an analysis of Sears&#39;s software, set to be made public on Tuesday.Problems with the retailer&#39;s My SHC Community program were first brought to light in late December, when CA senior engineer Benjamin Googins, wrote a blog entry criticizing the software, which was written by VoiceFive, a subsidiary of Internet measurement firm ComScore.Sears launched the My SHC Community in March, intending it to be a vehicle for customers who want a voice in the company&#39;s direction. &quot;It&#39;s still kind of in its early days,&quot; said Rob Harles, vice president of MY SHC Community, in an interview conducted prior to Edelman&#39;s post. &quot;It&#39;s mainly used right now for research, but what we want to do is open it up so it&#39;s creating dialogue with our customers.&quot;Sears Holdings, the owner of the Sears Roebuck and Kmart department stores is the third-largest retailer in the U.S.Sears offers members $10 and a chance to win one of several sweepstakes as an extra incentive to join the program.But in return, a small percentage of members must install extremely invasive software.According to Googins, the product monitors not only all of the user&#39;s Web traffic, but also keeps track of secure sessions like visits to bank sites, sniffs through e-mail headers, and then sends that information to a ComScore.While Googins called the software &quot;a significant threat to privacy,&quot; Harles doesn&#39;t see it that way. First off, he said that members can join the community with or without the tracking software and that less than 10 percent of the members have signed up for the tracking program.And those who get the tracking software installed have all personally identifying information scrubbed by ComScore and are informed of exactly what&#39;s going on, he added.Harles sent Googlins a detailed rebuttal to his claims, which the CA researcher has published on his blog.Edelman said Monday the Sears executive is simply wrong. &quot;The comments from ... Rob Harles are remarkable,&quot; he said. &quot;Exactly contrary to actual facts as best I can tell.&quot;Sears does disclose that it is installing tracking software, but doesn&#39;t do enough to make sure that users have seen these disclosures before they download the program, Edelman said in his analysis.&quot;The FTC requires that software makers and distributors provide clear, prominent, unavoidable notice of the key terms,&quot; he wrote. &quot;SHC&#39;s installation of ComScore did nothing of the kind.&quot;In an interview, Harles said that Sears had no immediate plans to change its disclosure policies, but he did say that My SHC Community would undoubtedly evolve in some ways.This isn&#39;t the first time ComScore&#39;s software has been in the news. In June, Edelman documented how they company&#39;s tracking software was being installed on some PCs without consent.&quot;Why so many problems for ComScore?&quot; Edelman wrote in his latest blog posting. &quot;The basic challenge is that users don&#39;t want ComScore software. ComScore offers users nothing sufficiently valuable to compensate them for the serious privacy invasion ComScore&#39;s software entails. There&#39;s no good reason why users should share information about their browsing, purchasing, and other online activities. So time and time again, ComScore and its partners resort to trickery (or worse) to get their software onto users&#39; PCs.&quot;
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A company which makes software that infiltrates users&#39; computers and demands $30 to be removed has been targeted by US authorities.
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Ex-chip maker whips out bus snooping infringement claim
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Ask Eileen Harrington, associate director of the FTC's consumer protection bureau, questions about spam and consumer fraud on the Internet.
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Have adware and spyware commandeered your computer? An extreme solution: erasing your hard drive and starting over.
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The company unveils the first version of a spyware-killing application based on technology from recently acquired Giant Software.
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EDITOR&#39;S NOTE: This is the first of a two-part series on the spyware epidemic. NEW YORK - David Eckstein turned on his computer one day and launched his Web browser, just as he had every day.
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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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'This machine should not have been on the Internet' Researchers led by the head of a Florida anti-spyware firm aim to recreate what caused a Connecticut school's classroom computer to start displaying pornographic pop-ups in October 2004, an incident that recently led to four felony convictions for the substitute teacher involved.â¦
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FTC charges that New York firm infected victims' computers with adware.
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The Federal Trade Commission won an important victory last week in its fight to protect consumers from spyware, the software that tracks unsuspecting Web surfers, bombards them with advertisements and sometimes even steal login information and passwords.
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Question: In a recent column you said that 95 percent of all viruses and spyware are aimed at Internet Explorer, so I decided to do away with IE.