Malware

Privacy, rights groups support gov’t spyware detection tool

A group of privacy and human rights organizations have joined together to support a malware detection tool that lets users check for surveillance malware used by government on their Windows PCs.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Amnesty International, Digitale Gesellschaft and Privacy International have come out in favor of the Detekt, an open source tool developed by Claudio Guarnieri, that can spot the spyware, which can read personal emails, listen in on private calls, record keystrokes and activate remotely cameras on targeted users' computers and can, an EFF blog post said, go “undetected by existing commercial antivirus products.”

The organizations, said the blog post, “have all had experience assisting journalists and activists who have faced the illegitimate use of such software in defiance of accepted international human rights law.”

Detekt "cannot conclusively guarantee" a computer hasn't been compromised by spyware.

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