| Just when you thought it was a bit safer to download software from the Internet, another threat jumps up to reinstate a healthy fear.
On the win one side, a U.S. judge has ordered a spyware distributor to hand over funds he received from tricking consumers into downloading screensavers loaded with adware and spyware.
The Federal Trade Commission announced Monday, that a U.S. District Court judge in Nevada granted the commission’s request for a default judgment against ERG Ventures LLC, its principals, and their affiliate, Timothy P. Taylor. In November of 2006, the FTC charged the parties with tricking consumers into downloading malicious software by hiding it inside seemingly innocuous free programs, including screensavers and video files. Once downloaded, the malware activated itself and installed programs that changed consumers’ homepages, tracked their Internet activity, altered browser settings, degraded performance and disabled anti-spyware and anti-virus software.
The judgment against Taylor bars him from distributing software that interferes with consumers’ computers, including spyware, and orders him to give up all of the income made from his schemes – amounting to $4,595.36.
On the lose one side, the blogosphere was active Monday with news that a helpful shareware program that allows people to back up their Gmail account to a local drive, was not so helpful after all. It seems the software, called G-Archiver, also captured email usernames and passwords and sent them to the inbox of one of the program’s creators.
It seems hard to believe that this could have been an innocent error, but this message was posted on the G-Archiver site later Monday:
What happened with G-Archiver?
It has come to our attention that a flaw in the coding of G-Archiver may have revealed customer's Gmail account usernames and passwords. It is urgent that you remove the current version of G-Archiver from your computer, and change your Gmail account password right away.
What happened was that a member of our development team had inserted coding used for testing G-Archiver in the debug version and forgot to delete it in the final release version.
We sincerely apologize and assure you that this coding mishap was in no way intentional.
We'll be releasing a new version that corrects the flaw in version 1.0. The new version will be available very soon.
Sounds sincere, but it will be a lot easier to write Version 1.0 than it will be to regain users’ trust.
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