Although it seems that considerable progress has been made regarding the fight against spyware, the legal representatives in such a battle say a major change of the outcome depends now on the approval of the SpyAct by the US Congress. This would lead to civil fines on companies that distribute spyware to consumers' computersFTC (U.S. Federal Trade Commission) gets the authority to impose such fines. The bill is currently stalled in the Senate.
According to Commissioner Jon Leibowitz, the authority that the FTC now has, only allows the commission to gather earnings from spyware operations and raise funds for damage compensations to the consumers.
Pop-up advertisements to computers are yet to be seen as serious threat by legal courts and to be treated respectively Some FTC representatives even complain that spyware damagesUS$3 million worth fines if the bill gets through. At the moment, the companies undergoing such operations are aware that the only risk they are exposed to be getting their profits confiscated.
It has been reported a serious decrease of the spyware costs for the American consumers from $2.6 billion in 2006, to only $1.7 billion in 2007, at the same time with a considerable development of foreign spyware vendors.
This may be due to an improvement of the antispyware technology, the legal actions FTC has taken lately against companies involved in spyware activities, and the list of spyware supported Web sites published by StopBadware.org. Along with these, it seems that recent special programs intended for public education have been very successful.
Still, as Ron Teixeira, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA put it , acknowledging the problem by the consumers does not necessarily lead to a proper action from their part as to solve it meaning that few of those who know the danger that spyware present have , however, taken precaution, protecting their computers with antivirus, antispyware and firewall.
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