Wednesday, December 03, 2008

EU wants to trojan PCs for remote search?

A rather worrying, but also amusing story appeared on the Register the other day saying that the EU is looking at the possibility of using torjan remote searches on people's computers in order to tackle cyber-crime.

As El Reg notes, there are practical problems with trying to do this however much politicians might want to.
For starters, infecting the PC of a target of an investigation is hit and miss. Malware is not a precision weapon, and that raises the possibility that samples of the malware might fall into the hands of cybercrooks.

Even if a target does get infected there's a good chance any security software they've installed will detect the malware. Any security vendor who agreed to turn a blind eye to state-sanctioned Trojans would risk compromising their reputation, as amply illustrated by the Magic Lantern controversy in the US a few years back.
Absolutely.

5 comments:

T England. Raised from the dead. said...

Shall we just laugh at this?
maybe not!
If it's a clever trojan like the one the Chinese have been using to "alegidly" hack our banks with then maybe I wont laugh to loudly!
But then again the EU like our government dont really seem to have a clue when they try to use threats like this! They just dont get the internet & the tools that work it.

When our EU masters master the net then maybe I'll start to worry :o)

Shaun said...

But can you imagine any government, let alone the EU delivering a software project? It will end up making Windows look nimble, shipping as it will in 20+ languages, making it one of the most easily identifiable lumps of malware the world has ever seen.

I won't even start on the innate humour of the EU creating viruses...

Mrs Smallprint said...

The EU is a virus, we caught it, it's spreading and we haven't yet found a party with the will to find a cure.

Mrs S.

Jabba the Cat said...

The El Reg line about Vic Mackey is hilarious.

Jabba does not intend to loose any sleep over this as close on the footsteps of any usage of such tactics will be sweep software, proportionately probably of a higher order than the malaware, lets face it we are talking about government IT here.

Robert said...

Billions spent and what will happen they will infect their own computers, then make a report saying they have found billions of scams and loss of money because of crooks and hackers, then somebody will say excuse me sir those are our own computers and the missing money are the cyber crime within Brussels.
ha ha ha ha