FTC Halts, Fines Spyware Operation

About time. One spyware company down. OK, so who’e next? A US court has ordered Sanford Wallace and his company, Smartbot.Net, to pay $4 million in restitution. This company was accused of tricking users into unwittingly installing spyware onto their computers. They used an age old hacker trick in order to facilitate sales.

The spyware caused the CD-ROM tray on computers to open and then issued a “FINAL WARNING!!” to computer screens with a message that said, “If your cd-rom drive’s open…You DESPERATELY NEED to rid your system of spyware pop-ups IMMEDIATELY! Download Spy Wiper NOW!”

Next up is the company Odysseus Marketing and its owner, Walter Rines, who have been accused of tricking visitors to their site to load peer to peer software that was in effect a front for spyware.

Article Link

[tags]Spyware, US Court, FTC[/tags]

Posted by Dave Lewis on May 7, 2006. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry