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Austrian secret service to use Trojans against criminals
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Tier-3
: 23 October, 2007 (Technical Article) |
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The move of the Austrian Government towards using spy-code Trojans to eavesdrop on criminal computer usage raises concerns over the code falling into the wrong hands. |
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Austria has become one of the first countries in the world to officially sanction the use of Trojan Horse malware to monitor the computers of suspected terrorists and criminals.
The move, announced late last week by Gunther Plater, the Austrian Interior Minister, will come as something of a shock to privacy watchers, said Geoff Sweeney, CTO of Tier-3, the behavioural software IT security firm.
'This is because Austria, a politically neutral country, has always been right up there alongside Switzerland in terms of personal and company privacy,' he said.
'Minister Plater has said that the Trojan malware will only be used against suspected terrorists and serious criminals, and will require a court order. That isn't much protection, and I am extremely concerned about this software falling into the wrong hands,' he added.
"I'm sure the Austrian Secret Service will develop some pretty ingenious software to infect users' PCs, but there is a real danger that the package could leak into the hacker community. That scenario would create a serious free-for-all on the industrial espionage and identity theft fronts as legitimate trojans are redirected to create an even more hostile environment for organisatons to defend against increasing the need to use behavioural protection software and anomaly detection to defend themselves against a prevalence of Trojans." Sweeney continued.
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