FTC Files First Lawsuit Against Spyware Concerns
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The Federal Trade Commission formally announced yesterday its first assault against spyware - bits of computer code that surreptitiously install themselves on the computers of Internet users
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The US Federal Trade Commission filed a legal complaint last week against two companies that are believed to have infected computers with spyware and pop-up advertising and then attempted to sell their ownersâ anti-spyware software.
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WASHINGTON -- In what regulators are calling a first, the federal government has asked for a court order to shut down a spyware operation.
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has asked a federal court to require an alleged Web page hijacking operation to obey previous orders barring unfair and deceptive practices.Walter Rines, business partner Sanford Wallace, and Rines&#39; company, Online Turbo Merchant, diverted users of MySpace.com to other Web sites and barraged them with ads to earn advertising commissions, according to court papers filed with the FTC. The defendants used pagejacking, phishing, and other methods to target MySpace users in violation of a previous court order, the FTC said in a news release.The FTC, in a Jan. 23 filing, asked the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire to order the defendants to give up the money they earned from their MySpace scheme.Rines&#39; listed phone number in New Hampshire was disconnected.In October 2005, the FTC charged Odysseus Marketing and its owner, Rines, with luring consumers to their Web site by offering free software, including a program that supposedly allowed them to engage in anonymous peer-to-peer file sharing. The software was bundled with spyware that intercepted and replaced search results and barraged consumers&#39; computers with pop-up ads, the FTC said. The software also stole users&#39; personal information, and users were unable to locate or uninstall the spyware through reasonable means, the FTC said.The FTC alleged that the defendants&#39; software captured consumers&#39; personal information and transmitted the information to the defendants&#39; servers. Consumers were unable to locate or uninstall the spyware through reasonable means, the agency charged. The court ordered a preliminary halt to these practices pending trial, and in October 2006 Odysseus and Rines settled the charges by stipulating to a permanent injunction.The permanent injunction prohibited the defendants from redirecting consumers&#39; computers; from changing any Web browser&#39;s default home page; and from modifying or replacing the functions of any computer application. It required Rines and his company to obtain consumers&#39; express consent before downloading or distributing any content to their computers.The permanent injunction also imposed a $1.75 million judgment, and all but $10,000 was suspended based on the defendants&#39; inability to pay.In its recent filing, the FTC alleges that Rines, his company, and Wallace knew of the permanent injunction and violated that order by diverting users from MySpace.com to their Web sites.
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U.S. Federal Trade Commission says that a bill stalled in Congress would give it the tools it needs to fight spyware.
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has begun mailing claim forms to more than 1,400 identity theft victims who spent money to clear up identity-theft problems due to a security breach at data broker ChoicePoint announced in early 2005.
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Over the past few years, computer crimes and annoyances have become an increasingly important part of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's work. In the past year, the FTC has announced settlements with spammers, adware distributors, and even Sony BMG Music Entertainment, over its distribution of rootkit software.
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(InfoWorld) - Two consumer protection groups are asking the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate FastMP3Search.com.ar, a Web site that distributes software that can be used to search for digital music on the Web. The FastMP3Search plugin disables the Windows Firewall, installs adware and Trojan horse programs, and generally hobbles the user's PC, said John Palfrey, the Harvard Law School professor who is StopBadware.org's co-director. The software is also virtually impossible to remove once installed, he added. StopBadware.org and the Center for Democracy and Technology plan to file a formal complaint with the FTC on Thursday. "We are asking the FTC to take a close look at an application that we consider to be the worst of the bad applications that we've seen over the course of the last year," Palfrey said. Representatives from FastMP3Search.com.ar could not be reached immediately for comment. The Web site is registered to a company called Direct S.A., based in Buenos Aires, according to the Network Information Center Argentina domain name database. StopBadware.org was also unable to reach representatives from the company before filing its complaint Palfrey said. The company's Web site tells users that the software will provide a fast way to search the Internet for downloadable music files, "in exchange for your agreement to also install our plugin software, which may occasionally display ads on your computer." Although the FTC has sought court orders to shut down Web sites in the past, the fact that FastMP3Search.com.ar appears to be based in Argentina complicates matters, Palfrey admitted. Still the FTC has worked on international efforts to fight spam and online fraud. "When an application is hosted outside of the U.S., but is plainly affecting U.S. consumers, they can coordinate with other governments," Palfrey said. "We would hope that they would start an investigation of this application." FTC representatives could not be reached immediately for comment. Formed earlier this year with funding from Google Inc. Lenovo Group Ltd., and Sun Microsystems Inc., StopBadware.org has issued reports on dozens of software products that engage in questionable or downright malicious behavior. It has exposed problems in everything from Kazaa to the Jessica Simpson Screensaver, to AOL LLC's free client.
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WASHINGTON - In what regulators are calling a first, the government has asked for a court order to shut down a spyware operation.    The Federal Trade Commission says computer users who went to certain Web sites unknowingly had the snooping software downloaded onto their computers...
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A U.S. Internet marketer has agreed  to stop inundating computers with unwanted "spyware" that can  disable users' computers while he fights a lawsuit from the  U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
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FTC charges that Petco Web site left customer data exposed.
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Organizations and law enforcement agencies fighting spyware are making progress, but new tools in an antispyware bill stalled in the U.S. Congress could improve the efforts, a member of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said Monday.One of the spyware bills passed by the House of Representatives earlier this year, the Spy Act, would give the FTC authority to impose civil fines on companies that distribute spyware to consumers&#39; computers. The bill, along with the Internet Spyware Prevention (or I-SPY) Act, have&#160;stalled in the Senate&#160;since passing the House in May and June.The FTC has the authority to collect profits from spyware operations and collect money for consumer redress, but it lacks the authority to impose other fines, as it does when going after spammers, said Commissioner Jon Leibowitz, speaking at a spyware forum in Washington, D.C.Assigning a dollar figure to consumer harm is tricky in many spyware cases, especially when the spyware delivers pop-up advertisements to computers, Leibowitz said. It&#39;s sometimes difficult to get courts to assign large consumer damages to pop-up cases, he said.In some cases, spyware damages are assessed by judges &quot;who don&#39;t even use computers,&quot; said Dave Koehler, with the FTC&#39;s Bureau of Consumer Protection.The Spy Act would allow the FTC to fine spyware vendors up to $3 million for hijacking computers, delivering unwanted adware, and other violations, and $1 million for collecting personal data without permission, in addition to going after the vendor&#39;s profits and seeking consumer redress.Additional authority to impose civil fines would give the FTC &quot;an enormous deterrent,&quot; Leibowitz said.&quot;Right now, companies know that the worst they can do is lose their profits,&quot; he added. &quot;They&#39;re not going to get fined on top of that.&quot;The FTC has brought several spyware actions against companies. In February, the agency settled&#160;a case against adware distributor DirectRevenue. In that case, DirectRevenue settled for $1.5 million, based on its profits, but the founders of the company had received more than $20 million in venture-capital funding, Leibowitz said.While participants in the spyware forum said there continue to be many challenges, including a growing trend of foreign spyware vendors, the cost of spyware to U.S. consumers seems to be falling. Consumer Reports estimated that spyware cost U.S. consumers $2.6 billion in 2006, but only $1.7 billion in 2007, noted Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a supporter of StopBadware.org, a consumer-protection effort aimed at spyware and other malicious code.The drop in the cost of spyware can be attributed to a number of factors, Schwartz said. Antispyware technology is getting better, the FTC has taken action against spyware vendors, and StopBadware.org has distributed a&#160;list of malicious Web sites, he said. In addition, some states have taken action against spyware, and cybersecurity groups&#39; public education programs seem to be working, he said.But Ron Teixeira, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), noted that consumers may know more about spyware, but they aren&#39;t always acting on their knowledge. A survey released by the NCSA and McAfee earlier this month found 78 percent of respondents&#39; computers didn&#39;t have all three of what the NCSA calls the &quot;core protection&quot; software: anti-virus, antispyware, and firewall.&quot;We&#39;re not seeing a huge increase in the actual behavior change,&quot; he said.
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The FTC has won a settlement against a spyware operation responsible for installing malware on users' computers that tracked Internet activity, changed home-page settings and inserted a large frame onto browser windows that displayed ads.
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Secure Computing will pay a total of $1 million to settle Washington state's first spyware case.
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With phishing attacks skyrocketing, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued a consumer alert detailing ways Web surfers can avoid being fleeced by online scammers.
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The Federal Trade Commission has asked a US District Court to shut down a computer spyware operation. The FTC said Tuesday the operation hijacks computers, secretly changes their
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The U.S. government has sued a New  Hampshire man in its first attempt to crack down on Internet  "spyware" that seizes control of a user's computer without  permission.