Star Massive Spyware-Based Identity Theft Ring Uncovered
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 7th Aug 2005 12:20 UTC, submitted by bsnipes
Privacy, Security, Encryption Researchers from a little-known security software company named Sunbelt Software have seemingly uncovered a criminal identity theft ring of massive proportions. According to one of their employees, Alex Eckelberry, during the course of one of their recent investigations into a particular Spyware application - rumored to be called CoolWebSearch - they've discovered that the personal information of those "infected" was being captured and uploaded to a server.
E-mail Print r 0   94 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/8v4
Thread beginning with comment 15730
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.

Member since:

Firstly - one must put an execute bit AFAIK on anything to make it executable.

>>Even those of us who try to keep up will at some point have to TRUST something. Maybe those in the know trust less, but still, at some point, you trust the distro you just installed is clean and the package maintainer did not put in some goodies. <<

Not this is a half decent point - if we were not talking about open source.

But we are talking about OPEN SOURCE repositories.

The TRUST bit comes about because Open Source says "SHOW ME THE CODE" !!!!

Everybody who might want to use the repositories can see the code if they want to. Many who do use the code (including those who maintain the repositories) and who did not write the code are nevertheless perfectly capable of seeing how it works. This is the very heart and soul of Open Source.

Those who have the skills to know what they are examining have seen the code and they use it themselves - therefore it contains no malware.

That is the guarantee of Open Source.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 0