Government cracks down on spyware operation

Government regulators are trying to shut down a company they say secretly downloaded spyware onto the computers of unwitting Internet users, rendering them helpless to a flood of pop-up ads, computer crashes and other annoyances.

The Federal Trade Commission accused Walter Rines of Stratham, N.H., and his company, Odysseus Marketing, of luring computer users with the promise of free software that would make peer-to-peer file sharing anonymous. The claim was bogus, the agency said, and the software was bundled with spyware that was secretly downloaded onto computers.

Odysseus allegedly used a spyware program called Clientman that spawned downloads of dozens of other programs -- slowing computers down, bombarding them with pop-up ads and redirecting them to fake search engines that were rigged to show Rines' clients first, according to the FTC complaint.

The agency also said the spyware was impossible to remove. Rines, the FTC said, offered his own "uninstall" tool, but it didn't work and actually installed additional software.

The FTC filed its first federal anti-spyware case last fall against Sanford Wallace, a New Hampshire man known as the "Spam King." It accused him of using spyware programs to infect computers and then selling $30 remedies that the agency said didn't work.

Wallace and Rines were partners at one time, the commission said.

full story @ boston.com