03/05/2013, 01:04 PM
Quote:http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/...ation.html
Gamma Group, a British company, offers governments and law enforcement agencies spy Trojans that are designed to covertly infiltrate computers and gather data from hard drives, eavesdrop on Skype chats and other communications, and conduct "live surveillance through webcam and microphone," according to marketing materials. The technology is supposed to be used solely to target serious criminals such as terrorists. However, a mounting body of evidence has linked it to attacks on activists or political opposition figures from countries including Bahrain and Ethiopia. A report published last month revealed that servers linked to Gamma’s line of “FinFisher” surveillance Trojans have been traced to servers running in at least 25 countries, including several with poor human rights records, such as Malaysia, Qatar, Turkmenistan, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, and Vietnam.
Last year, researchers spotted that the spy tool had apparently been masking itself as Mozilla Firefox—tricking targeted users into thinking it was a legitimate application. I drew this to Mozilla’s attention in September and, after months of declining to comment, the company recently told me it had been in discussions with attorneys, consumer advocacy groups, and other software companies about launching legal action against Gamma for potential trademark violation. “Wee found what Gamma was doing to be highly offensive,” Alex Fowler, Mozilla’s chief privacy officer, told me in a phone call earlier this month. “The trust that people have put into the Mozilla brand, the Firefox brand, is one of our most important assets—it’s what people put a lot of faith in. So for a company using those brands and trademarks in a way that is playing off of that trust and brand to surreptitiously surveil citizens living in countries with repressive regimes—it's doubly offensive.”
![[Image: header-logo.png]](https://mozorg.cdn.mozilla.net/media/img/firefox/template/header-logo.png){kind=logo}
![[Image: gammaGroup_logo.gif]](https://www.gammagroup.com/Images/gammaGroup_logo.gif){kind=logo}
There is a post on the Mozilla blog concerning this.
Also, about this story's title: NO WHERE in the story does anyone representing Mozilla mention a lawsuit of any kind. Since when is a 'cease and desist' letter equivalent to a lawsuit?