Germany wants to spy on suspects via Web Germany is proposing to use trojan horse software to enable surveillance of target computers. I have to wonder how effective this will actually be. They are talking about distributing it in an apparently official email from a government email address.

Now that the bad guys know this, it seems likely that they will take more care with the attachments from the government.
Anti-virus / anti-malware programs should be able to identify and block this software
If the anti-virus software makers are convinced to leave a hole for this software, it will be a huge back door for other hackers to use to deploy their trojan horse software.

In general this seems like a high risk operation for the Germans. I suspect that it will be used rarely and very selectively.

CIO - China Makes Viruses for Cyberwar First-Strike We really have moved on from the idea of the hacker portrayed in the movie "war games". A young boy working out of his bedroom. These days it is a very professional operation, run by organized criminals, or governments in this case.

Because of the anti-censorship work we do Anonymizer has already been on the receiving end of numerous attacks out of China that appear to be government sponsored and initiated.

The Internet is now absolutely part of every nation's critical infrastructure. Cyber war provides a relatively bloodless form of attack that can do massive economic damage and potentially leave little evidence of who launched the attack. It is also a powerful leveler. Using standard hacking methods like bot nets even a tiny country or terrorist organization could inflict damage completely out of proportion to its resources.