Swiss to Use Spyware to Listen to VoIP

An anonymous reader writes "Heise Security is reporting that the Swiss Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications is entertaining the idea of utilizing the 'Superintendant Trojan', a spyware program designed to allow eavesdropping on VoIP conversations. According to ERA IT Solutions, the creator of the software, it will only be distributed to investigation agencies in the hopes of keeping it out of the hands of malicious hackers since firewalls apparently 'do not present a problem' for the software."

Comments

yea right

[grapeape]

If the trojan can be installed it can be sniffed out and discovered. I give it at tops a week of deployment before someone figures out what it is how it works and backwards engineers it into instant maymem for all the black hats.

Re:yea right

[whoever57]

If the trojan can be installed it can be sniffed out and discovered.

Which then raises the interesting question: how will anti-spyware vendors (including MS) respond to this? There really are no good solutions for an anti-spyware vendor in this case, since detecting it could be considered as hindering law enforcement, which would be illegal in many jurisdictions.

Re:yea right

[Coldmoon]

"There really are no good solutions for an anti-spyware vendor in this case, since detecting it could be considered as hindering law enforcement..."

Actually it will turn out to be the exact opposite. Once the program is in the wild and the black hats get their hands on it, both the AV and AS vendors will have no other choice than to add it to their detections.

Regardless of whether the detection is for the original Trojan or not, any subsequent black hat variations found would be added and the original would in all likelihood be flagged due to the particular (add your own term here) scanning technology.