Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Illegal e-cards to spy on your lover

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 21:40:55 -0400

Illegal e-cards to spy on your lover

SAN FRANCISCO, California (Reuters) --A company calling itself Lover Spy has 
begun offering a way for jealous lovers -- and anyone else -- to spy on the 
computer activity of their mates by sending an electronic greeting, the 
equivalent of a thinking-of-you card, that doubles as a bugging device.

Computer security experts said the Lover Spy service and software appeared to 
violate U.S. law, but also said the surveillance program pointed to an 
increasingly common way for hackers to seize control of computers.

Marketed as a way to "catch a cheating lover," the Lover Spy company offers 
to send an e-mail greeting card to lure the victim to a Web site that will 
download onto the victim's computer a trojan program to be used for spying.

Recording keystrokes

The Lover Spy software, sold for $89 for up to five computers, purports to 
record anything the victim does on the computer, including all keystrokes, 
passwords, e-mail, chats and screen shots and even turn on the victim's Web
camera.

The spy program discreetly sends the information to the Lover Spy server 
which then forwards it on to whoever paid for the software, maintaining their 
anonymity, according to the company Web site, which did not list contact 
information.

"Lover Spy is being used today by private investigators worldwide, spouses 
and parents who want to protect their children," the site claims.

"You don't need physical access to the computer," said Richard Smith, an 
independent privacy and security researcher in Boston. "It makes it so you can spy 
on anybody you want."

Possible felony

"That would be a felony," said Mark Rasch, former head of the U.S. Department 
of Justice's computer crime unit and chief security counsel for security 
company Solutionary. "Loading a program onto someone else's computer without their 
authorization is patently illegal."

"Yikes! That is clearly a wiretapping violation," Chris Hoofnagle, associate 
director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said when told of Lover 
Spy.

"It sounds a lot like a commercial version of Magic Lantern," the 
controversial program the FBI proposed a few years ago to remotely install a
keystroke 
logger onto people under investigation, he said.

Other spyware exists, such as eBlaster from Florida-based SpectorSoft, but it 
is installed manually and marketed for customers to install on their own 
computer, Rasch said.

However, even installing a spyware program on your own computer may be 
illegal if it is recording the data of someone else without their consent,
depending 
on the state in which the spying occurs, Hoofnagle said.

Setting up defenses

Not only could the Lover Spy company be prosecuted for selling software that 
enables spying, but the person who pays for the service could face up to 10 
years in prison and fines for actual damages under the federal Computer Fraud 
and Abuse Act, he said.

Web sites that surreptitiously send programs to a visitor's computer are an 
increasingly security menace, said Chris Wysopal, research director at security 
consultancy AtStake in Boston.

"The risk has always been there, but when the tools are really easy to use 
you are going to see more spying going on," he said.

The only defenses are anti-virus software, which may be able to detect the 
spyware, and a personal computer firewall which can alert a user when the trojan 
tries to connect to the Internet to send data out, according to Wysopal.

People should be cautious about allowing Web sites to run unknown code on 
their PC, he added.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/09/30/spyware.lover.reut/index.html

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