Hooray For Our State

My home state is Washington, home of the Superbowl-bound Seahawks and the Microsoft juggernaut. And, according to the both the Washington State attorney general and Microsoft, if you paid $49.95 for Spyware Cleaner from a company called Secure Computer, you have been duped.

Both Microsoft and the State of Washington have filed lawsuits against Secure Computer and its principals, charging them with violating the Washington Computer Spyware Act and three other laws. The act, effective since mid-2005, provides for a fine of up to $100,000 per violation. It is the first lawsuit filed by the state's attorney general under the new law.

Secure Computer allegedly used deceptive links on search engine Google's Web site, as well as in pop-up advertising and in spam e-mail for Spyware Cleaner to imply that the software came from or was endorsed by Microsoft, according to the suit. Additionally, the company is accused of using a Windows feature to pop up warnings on users' PCs, telling them their system had been compromised.

The messages urged the users to run a spyware scan. "The program...falsely claims that a computer is infected with spyware," the Attorney General said. The PC users were subsequently advised to buy Spyware Cleaner for $49.95 to remove the malicious software, he said, but the product did not do what it promised. According to the suit, the program fails to clean a computer of spyware and actually changes a computer's settings that leave it susceptible to future attacks from other spyware and related programs.

An attorney for Secure Computer said his client was "shocked and surprised" by the allegations. I will bet they were!

By the way, if you have been a victim of spyware or deceptive adware, there is now a place where you can tell your story. A new coalition that is sponsored by Google, Lenovo, Sun Microsystems, and organizers the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK with an assist from the Consumer Reports' WebWatch project, formed the Stop Badware Coalition to combat spyware and adware. They are calling it all, "badware."

According to them, "StopBadware.org is a "Neighborhood Watch" campaign aimed at fighting badware. We will seek to provide reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help consumers make better choices about what they download onto their computers. We aim to become a central clearinghouse for research on badware and the bad actors who spread it, and become a focal point for developing collaborative, community-minded approaches to stopping badware."

The coalition wants your badware horror stories, and will publicize the offenders. Sounds like a good idea.