Virus writers charged with copyright violation
Movie-munching Trojan miscreants go all Winny
Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery
Japan has arrested its first suspected virus writers, but in a strange twist the three suspected creators and distributors of a strain of P2P malware have been charged with copyright violation, in an arrest that recalls Al Capone's prosecution for tax evasion.
The trio were cuffed by cops in Kyoto on suspicion of involvement in a plot to infect users of the Winny P2P file-sharing network with a Trojan horse that displayed images of popular animé characters while wiping MP3 and movie files. The malware, called Harada is Japanese reports, is reckoned to be related to the Pirlames Trojan horse intercepting by net security firm Sophos in Japan last year.
According to local reports, the three men have confessed to their roles in unleashing the malware. One is said to have created the malware, while the other duo are reckoned to have offered the malware up to prospective marks on Winny. A lack of relevant computer crime law in Japan means that the group have been charged with copyright offences.
"It isn't illegal to write viruses in Japan, so the author of the Trojan horse has been arrested for breaching copyright because he used cartoon graphics without permission in his malware," explained Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "Because this is the first arrest in Japan of a virus writer, it's likely to generate a lot of attention and there may be calls for cybercrime laws to be made tighter."
Due to the lack of applicable cybercrime laws, the authors of the malware face much the same fate as the coder who developed Winny. Isamu Kaneko, Winny's author, was fined by a Japanese court in December 2006 for copyright offences. ®
COMMENTS
Don't accuse me of racism
@AC I am not a racist I was expressing incredulity in other words I did not believe Japan possibly the most technically advanced nation on the planet would not have laws pertaining to the destruction of data by virus as it happens they do have such laws so I was right it's probably that copyright violations carry more weight and are easier to prove just as in the case of Al Capone we had laws against murder and bootlegging but getting anyone to testify was impossible so they used his books against him no need for witnesses.
Japanese Cybercrime Law
Of course Japan has a cybercrime law, it was covered in a presentation at the AVAR Conference in 2004:
www.aavar.org/2004web/AVAR2004/Presentations/ps013.ppt
It does cover data damage, so why wasn't it applied here? I have three guesses:
1. None of the victims would admit loosing any data because it was all pirated.
2. The wording of the law doesn't cover intermediation by malware... the *victim* chose to run the program.
3. That Police unit doesn't know what it's doing.
More comments:
articles.yuikee.com.hk/newsletter/2008/01/h.html
define illegal copy
when's the last time you looked in your temporary internet files... full of stolen images, icons, banners and, strangely, pictures of Paris.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Top 10 SIEM implementer’s checklist
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
