EFF, Amnesty International Back Effort to Stop Surveillance Amnesty International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other groups are throwing their weight behind a new open-source software malware detection project called Detekt.
Unlike the more all-purpose antivirus and anti-malware programs, Detekt centers around detecting and warning end users of surveillance malware of the sort known to be used by government.
The revelations of NSA surveillance last year by Edward Snowden has brought new attention to the problem of government surveillance, and nations across the planet are using malware utilities to spy on civilians.
The Detekt program was developed by Claudio Guarnieri, who has previously developed other programs related to the analysis of malware. Detekt is designed only for Windows-based computers, which of course are the most commonly used and subsequently most commonly targeted.
Detekt is available at resistsurveillance.org, and the source is available at github. The program’s authors warn it may not detect the newest revisions of government surveillance malware, but that it may help weed out some of the most common.