Cyber and computer laws are always a grey area, they tend to be very vague and don’t cover specific technologies.

Spam is a good example, look at how long we’ve been getting spammed, and it’s been a SERIOUS problem for at least the last 5 years, spam legislation has only started coming in to effect in the last 1-2 years seriously..

Now it’s time to look at Spyware?

Even though security technology is improving, spyware legislation is still needed from Congress because many consumers don’t use all the tech tools available to them, antispyware groups said Thursday.

Antispyware groups including the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and StopBadware.org called on Congress to pass antispyware legislation during the last days of the 2006 session. Although some studies show a small decrease in the amount of spyware on PCs, the use of spyware that logs keystrokes seems to be going up, said Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the CDT.

“The issue is everyone’s still making money doing this,” Schwartz said during an antispyware discussion in Washington. Spyware distributors identified by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) or the CDT can pull in tens of millions of dollars in revenue annually, he added.

It’s true, sad, but true..The developers of spyware and making millions from it every year.

Antispyware technology can work, but 81 percent of home PC users don’t use all three common security tools — antispyware software, antivirus software and firewalls — according to a survey published in December by AOL LLC and the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA).

“We still think consumers are not protected,” said Ron Teixeira, the NCSA’s executive director. “If they don’t take these three core measures, it doesn’t matter what we do.”

So what to do?

Source: Computerworld

Ethical debates are always interesting, and people have gotten in trouble lately for reverse engineering and various other branches of research.

This is a fairly old topic, but as I’m clearing out some old drafts, I still find it an interesting one.

There’s been an ongoing debate in security circles concerning how security researchers should disclose vulnerabilities for a long time, Darknet is of course in the Full Disclosure school of thinking. The common viewpoint is that the researchers should disclose the vulnerabilities to the company, giving them some time to fix the problem.

Typically, however, if nothing is done to fix the vulnerability, then researchers eventually will disclose it publicly. That’s where a lot of the conflict occurs, and there are even some questionable laws that might get you in trouble for publicly discussing a vulnerability. However, does this apply to spyware research as well?

The main question is, should the vulnerabilities ever be posted publically? I of course say yes, as if I’m using that software, I have the right to know there’s something wrong with it and take remedial measures, even if there’s no patch (that’s the beauty of open source, you can patch it yourself!).

There was a lot of conversation during the 180solution period about responsible disclosure and disclosing the affiliates used to install spyware, someone 180 always manage to spin it into a self-serving press release about how they triumphed over evil.

Ah ethics, always an interesting topic.

The whole thing became a virtual war between a high profile security researcher and the spammy 180solution folks.

The sniping between a controversial adware company and a prominent anti-spyware researcher continued Thursday as 180solutions defended its practices and called critic Ben Edelman “irresponsible.”

Earlier this week, Bellevue, Wash.-based 180 solutions, which distributes software that delivers ads to users’ computers, blasted Edelman, a Harvard researcher, for improperly disclosing a hack into the company’s installation software. Last week, Edelman had posted an analysis of an illegal download of 180′s Zango software by an affiliate Web site of 180′s advertising network.

You can read more here.

Last year, we noted how some security products could cause conflicts that would cause computers to lock up — but there’s another (less troublesome) trend that’s happening as well: security products declaring competing products as malware and removing them.

Just a little over a week ago, the latest version of Microsoft’s anti-spyware offering declared Symantec’s anti-virus offering as malware. However, it looks like Kaspersky Labs has Symantec’s back on this one. Its latest anti-spyware offering flagged some Microsoft anti-virus software as being malware. Of course, this was bound to happen, since many security products often have to do things that look quite like malware.

This is only likely going to get worse — and many of these standalone companies might want to start thinking about proactively trying to deal with the issue. In the meantime, it seems like the security suite providers should be using this as an opportunity to hype up how their combined offering does everything in one package (even if that’s not quite true), so you never need additional, conflicting software.

According to several different support threads over at Microsoft’s user groups forum, the latest definitions file from Microsoft “(version 5805, 5807) detects Symantec Antivirus files as PWS.Bancos.A (Password Stealer).”

When Microsoft Anti-Spyware users remove the flagged Norton file as prompted, Symantec’s product gets corrupted and no longer protects the user’s machine. The Norton user then has to go through the Windows registry and delete multiple entries (registry editing is always a dicey affair that can quickly hose a system if the user doesn’t know what he or she is doing) so that the program can be completely removed and re-installed.

I put in calls to Microsoft and to Symantec on this issue, but am still waiting to hear back from both companies.

Source: Washington Post

I have had similar problems in the past with things detecting HijackThis! or Spybot as Malware..or playing with having two level 7 firewalls installed.