the secure:channel

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According to Brian Krebs, Security Fix blogger for The Washington Post, the State of Washington, assisted by Microsoft Corp., has filed a “John Doe” lawsuit against the distributor of the Antivirus 2009 malware, which I wrote about earlier.

A “John Doe” lawsuit is a law suit that is filed against a party that you don’t yet have an identify for. Once the law suit is filed for, subpoenas are used to gain the identify of the other party. Any law suit against a web site owner that is trying to hide behind false or missing contact information will typically start out like this.

The law suits were filed under Washington State’s Computer Spyware Statute. The Computer Spyware Statute passed into law in 2005, and among other things, the law makes it illegal to falsely entice someone to download software by claming it is necessary for security or privacy. The statute allows for penalties up to $100,000 per violation. The first law suit under this act was filed in January of 2006 by the state’s attorney general, which also received assistance from Microsoft.

This is good news. I was wondering how long these criminals would be allowed to run rampant, maintaining a rather stable web presence for many months now.