Your New Computer Virus Came With A EULA, Didn't You Read It?

From Ars Technica


Please read carefully

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This is not a joke. You will be persecuted to the full extent of the law. Har!

Selling botnets for particular attacks, black markets for stolen identities, and malware construction kits are all now par for the course for the increasingly commercial malware industry.

Discovering that malware authors have actually turned to End-User License Agreements (EULAs) in an attempt to protect their own intellectual property, however, most definitely qualifies as something new, different, and beautifully ironic.

It's obviously difficult for the manufacturers of an illegal product to threaten legal sanctions against an infringer, but the Zeus authors give it their best shot. According to the EULA, "In cases of violations of the agreement and being detected, the client loses any technical support. Moreover, the binary code of your bot will be immediately sent to antivirus companies."

Frankly, "We'll blow your kneecaps off and feed them to you," might be a bit more effective as a threat, but I suppose it's a bit hard to carry out that threat over the Internet.

If the folks behind Zeus are serious—and they seem to be—they've obviously got a rather warped sense of reality. The prospect of a fully commercialized malware distribution system isn't an idea anyone in security IT relishes, but watching illegal businesses attacking each other over illegal modifications to illegal products could be downright hilarious.

Someday, someone might send Uncle Nunzio over to Zeus and other known malware authors to discuss EULAs. That would be 'ironic'.

What's their point here? Micro$oft has been doing this exact same thing for a long, long time now.   

I suppose there is no more "honor among thieves."