DigiTask, the software developer credited with building the so-called Federal Trojan used by some of nation’s law enforcement agencies, faces an anti-competition law suit from a rival software developer.
German software company Wavecon last week confirmed it would pursue DigiTask in a civil action for breaching Germany’s anti-competition laws by selling an intercept product that went beyond the nation’s laws.
Wavecon’s IT specialist lawyer, Dominick Boeker, clarified the suit was because the two companies competed in the arena of custom software development, as opposed to making Trojans.
The legal threat to DigiTask follows the Chaos Computer Club’s analysis of a single sample of the Federal Trojan, which it claimed went well permitted levels of intercept and included screenshot and keylogging capabilities.
At a parliamentary hearing last week officials from Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) confirmed that 36 agencies had used a form of intercept malware 100 times in the four year’s since it was made lawful, according to Deutsche Welle.
There were 23 ongoing cases in which that type of software was being used prior to the Chaos Computer Club’s outing, a BKA spokesperson said, however only the Bavarian police used the malware that was the subject of CCC’s analysis.
Meanwhile, Germany’s Pirate Party, which won 9 per cent of the Berlin state election's vote, have called for law suits to brought against Bavaria’s Interior Minister Joachim Herrman and the president of the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office.
Researchers at antivirus company Kaspersky recently discovered another version of the DigiTask-made Trojan that supported 64-bit Windows machines, however it appeared to have design flaws.