Los Angeles - A young man was arrested on charges of spreading viruses to almost 400 000 military and other computers, putting "armies" of electronics under his control, then charging hackers and spammers for access to the so-called botnets, federal prosecutors said.

James Ancheta, 20, also downloaded adware programs so he could profit from the placements, federal prosecutors said. The 17-count indictment charges Ancheta with conspiracy, money-laundering, transmission of a malicious code to a government computer, and accessing a protected computer to commit fraud. If convicted on all counts, he could face 50 years in prison.

Posted by Greg Hewitt-Long in Virus & AntiVirus News at 07:45

By Matt Loney

Kaspersky calls it spyware, while at Sophos it's ineptware. Whatever you term the software used by Sony's digital rights management, antivirus companies are considering adding protection against it to their products.

Antivirus firms are considering protecting their customers from the digital rights management software used by Sony on some CDs.

Kaspersky Labs has classed Sony's DRM software as spyware because, among other things, it can cause crashes and loss of data and it can compromise system integrity and security.

Posted by Greg Hewitt-Long in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 07:39

By Seán Byrne

While Sony's use of rootkits and all its publicity may seem as bad as it is, apparently its DRM software is encountering further concerns including being classed as Spyware by Kaspersky Lab. It has also been found to introduce a security vulnerability as well as potentially crash Windows during the installation of Sony's recent patch to 'decloak it'. Once the user agrees to the EULA when the CD is loaded, the rootkit is installed, which makes files, directories and registry keys beginning with '$sys$' invisible to the system, such as those used by the CD's DRM software.

As Sony's rootkit can hide files and registry keys, this introduces quite a serious security risk, since hackers, viruses or other unwanted software can make themselves invisible also on any system with this rootkit installed just by adding a $sys$ to the beginning of its file/directory names or registry keys. This is what makes it such a concern for the companies behind antivirus software since it cannot detect these type of files. Also, up until now, rootkits have only ever been used by malicious software and viruses, so tools that check for rootkits would need to be designed to recognise the difference between this and those used maliciously.

Posted by Greg Hewitt-Long in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 07:33