Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Massive Computer Spying Scandal Hits Germany

Sunday's edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper devoted five pages to printing part of the Trojan horse's source code. dapd

Electronic Surveillance Scandal Hits Germany -- Spiegel Online

A German hacker organization claims to have cracked spying software allegedly used by German authorities. The Trojan horse has functions which go way beyond those allowed by German law. The news has sparked a wave of outrage among politicians and media commentators.


It sounds like something out of George Orwell's novel "1984" -- a computer program that can remotely control someone's computer without their knowledge, search its complete contents and use it to conduct audio-visual surveillance via the microphone or webcam.

Read more
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My Comment: A few years ago I had some nasty spyware installed on my computer that made my computer operate super-slow. I usually use Spy-Bot to clean up my drive, but in this case I used a friends anti-spyware program that he was testing with people that he knew who were using computers constantly (my friend is employed by Canada's RCMP). While cleaning up my drive, we noticed that I had a unique "foreign file" in the boot-sector of my hard drive that was difficult to erase. Investigating further, we then noticed that this "foreign file" had a .... cough cough .... White House signature. A month before I had visited the White House website to obtain some non-copyrighted pictures, and while it was not the reason why my computer was slow, I could only speculate on why it was specifically placed in a part of drive that would make it difficult to not only detect (Spy-bot did not detect it), but to erase.

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