Germany proposes emailing Trojans
If you are a terror suspect in Germany, your computer might be infected purposely by the German government if proposed legislation makes it way through the German government.
We are quietly wondering if any of the Anti-virus folks will pick up the proposed Trojan that the German government is going to use if they get the legislation passed.
BERLIN - German officials on Friday defended a proposal to use “Trojan horse” software to secretly monitor potential terror suspects’ hard drives, amid fierce debate over whether the measures violate civil liberties. Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble wants to include the measure in a broader security law being considered by conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government. Carried in e-mails that appear to come from other government offices, the software would allow authorities to investigate suspects’ Internet use and the data stored on their hard drives without their knowledge. Source: Mercury News
This ought to be a very hard decision for the anti-virus companies, and will tip off most of the interested population if their programs will not pick up government sponsored malware. Then there is the implication that if Symantec, McAfee, and others do not pick up and detect the government malware, what other forms of malware sponsored or not does the anti-virus companies miss.
This ought to also really annoy any security engineer out there or the local equivalent of the computer service folks as well. What happens if a terror suspect takes their computer in to be worked on, and the folks format the disk and load up a new operating system? Have they broken a law, or worst yet, do they have a number to call and find out that they are working on a terror suspects computer system?
This one ought to be hard to deal with for most of the ecosystem around computer support. There are a lot of probable things here that could go very wrong, and while e-mailing a Trojan is one thing, most people are smart enough and trained enough now not to click on anything in e-mail that they do not recognize.
We have to wonder if the German government has thought this whole thing through, and we are also wondering what the down stream influences are going to be. If the terror suspect is smart enough, they will have a computer infected with everything so that they can claim that none of it is theirs. That defense at least in the USA has worked very well in the past. This one ought to be interesting in the longer run to see how everyone handles this proposal.
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