From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Jan 31 2002 - 11:00:53 MST
On Thu, Jan 31, 2002 at 09:36:52AM -0600, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> Loree Thomas wrote,
> > I got it the same way everybody else did... Have you
> > been reading what I write? I downloaded KaZa.
>
> You just don't understand. This isn't about you. It was never about you.
> It sounds like you have never run into the problem I am describing. I'm
> happy for you. However, this product is bundled into dozens of other
> freebie downloads and gets installed without users knowing about it. This
> is a security concern.
In a discussion on this on Slashdot (which we all know is a reliable and
impeccably correct forum ;-) it came up that the Vx2 spyware was made by
a company whose owner had previously been associated with a major
Internet fraud case. This is really reassuring when the software
"collects some information from online forms that you fill out. This
information is automatically sent to VX2 in order to save you the time
and trouble of submitting such information to us yourself". See
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/27/0354232&mode=thread the
"Who's behind "VX2 Corporation"" subthread.
While this exact piece of software may not be actually picking up credit
card numbers, it should be fairly obvious to any aspiring fraudster
reading about the software that there is a profit to be made by this
kind of spyware. Just imagine: companies pay you for putting their
advertisments on other people's pages, and meanwhile information from
online forms keep trickling into your servers, ready to be used when the
time is right. So if there isn't such software around yet, it is likely
a matter of time.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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