The software distributed by the police as protecting children from danger turned out to be as good as spyware

The number of parents to introduce a filter to protect children from harmful sites has increased, but in the United States popularity is widely popular since the long term, "ComputerCOP (computer · cup)" software which is also used in homes and educational institutions is popular , Some are distributed free from the administration. HoweverElectronic Frontier Foundation(EFF) warns that this ComputerCOP is a dangerous software that works just like spyware and leaks personal information easily because of insufficient security measures.

ComputerCOP: The Dubious 'Internet Safety Software' That Hundreds of Police Agencies Have Distributed to Families | Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/computercop-dangerous-internet-safety-software-hundreds-police-agencies

"ComputerCOP" was born in the late 1990s and started as software that can detect harmful files in PC just by entering keywords related to violence and sexual expression. For parents and educational institutions wanting to keep harmful files away from children ComputerCOP was a perfect software because it was a perfect software, and since many administrations budgeted and distributed ComputerCOP free of charge, It was widely used.


This is a retrieval utility of ComputerCOP that searched files by keyword search. According to EFF, the precision of the search is poor, and it sometimes hangs harmless files.


Although ComputerCOP says "It is possible to trace the history of search history of children and page movement" about Internet filtering function, it is effective only when the browser is IE or Safari, and also has the analysis function of the downloaded image Although it can not distinguish between the icon and the downloaded image, a lot of images hit.

The most important is a key logging program called "KeyAlert" that not only the characters typed with the keyboard by the child, but also the key input results of other users sharing the same PC are also logged up, and worse, The input history which was logged by the function to notify the parent of the alert mail when the keyword is input is transmitted to the external server. Note that these logs are not encrypted.


EFF is packet analysis softwareWiresharkWhen I caught a packet flowing over the network at the point, the log was transferred in a state that it was not encrypted.


Although it is such a poor result that ComputerCOP is a huge security hole, many people have trusted and used it without any doubt. EFF thinks that it is due to the clever promotion that ComputerCOP was doing.

This is a compilation movie of past promotional video of ComputerCOP. It is easy to understand that various titles have appealed the excellence of ComputerCOP and it can not be helped even if it is interpreted that "police and administrative agencies gave a seal."

Police Giving Out "ComputerCOP" Spyware - YouTube


EFF sounded a warning to immediately stop using ComputerCOP with many security problems and gently explained the uninstallation methodguidanceWe are also doing public. However, ironically, there are many people who are not familiar with PCs and software for patrons of ComputerCOP, so uninstalling work of ComputerCOP itself is difficult in the first place, it seems that des ComputerCOP has not progressed quite a bit.