U.S. moves towards anti-spyware law
A U.S. House subcommittee on Thursday approved what would be the first federal law to specifically target Internet spyware.
The SPY Act, for "Securely Protect Yourself Against Cyber Trespass," would oblige companies and individuals to conspicuously warn consumers before giving them a program capable of automatically transmitting information gathered from a user's computer. Though the bill carries no criminal penalties, and doesn't allows users to sue spyware merchants, anyone in the U.S. caught uploading such a program without obtaining the consumer's consent could face civil prosecution by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
A last-minute addition to the SPY Act also prohibit keystroke logging and the display of advertisements that cannot be closed, according to Rep. Mary Bono, the bill's sponsor. "We are one step closer to restoring safety, confidence and control to consumers when using their own computers," Bono said in a statement. The bill now goes to the full Commerce committee for a vote. A companion bill in under consideration in the Senate.
Spyware, and its ignoble cousin adware, appears to be a growing online nuisance. A survey of broadband users released last summer by the National CyberSecurity Alliance found that 91% of broadband consumers had some form of adware or spyware on their computers, and most were not aware of it.
In a report released this week, a free scanning tool provided by Earthlink and Webroot Software detected traces of nearly 73,000 Trojan horse installations and nearly 61,000 covert system monitoring programs in a scan of 420,000 PCs throughout the month of April. The same scans picked up 2.3 million adware programs.
Last week, security researchers found that an anonymous computer criminal was using a combination of unpatched vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Internet Explorer to forcibly install the I-Lookup adware search bar on victim's machines.
