Arrested for Planting Spyware on College Compus

AndrewM1 writes "In what may serve as a cautionary tale for people who use computers in public areas, Douglas Boudreau allegedly installed keystroke-monitoring software on more than 100 computers at Boston College and then watched as thousands of people sent e-mail, downloaded files and banked online. He then stole $2000 with the information he gleamed."

Comments

They may be shared machines

[Marqui]

But why weren't they locked down to prevent installations of software, etc?????? You would think that the admins should be on top of this. I know it's easier said than done, but it seems that someone should be watching this stuff!

Re:MIT

[Waffle Iron]

Any workstation that is pysically accessible to the public is subject to reprogrammning so that it emulates its original behavior plus logs keystrokes. Unless you're using honest-to-goodness dumb terminals with non-flashable ROMs, I wouldn't be so confident.

Re:MIT

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense. I can easily hack into a UNIX system without nothing more than a floppy disk and the power switch.

The real thing to remember is to never, ever, ever use a public system. That is the most sure way to give up all privacy. Even if there isn't a 3rd party breaking into and modifying the public machines, the true administrator of the machine might have all sorts of logging software.

Even if you use something like SSH or SSL, that only products you between the two endpoints. When one of the end-points (the client you are using, in thise case) is insecure, a secured data tunnel is worthless. Indeed, your keys/passwords/etc. can be stolen quite easily.

If you need to compute on the run, get a laptop that you are in control of. Don't use someone else's machine to conduct sensitive business or utilize sensitive information.

Crime is Crime not computer crime

[Dragon218]

The title to this article is not really accurate in this case. The person who was arrested stole $2000. He was arrested for that (or should have been). The keylogging software in this case was just the means to commit the crime. It shouldn't be illegal to install keylogging software (unless he's breaking the user agreement by installing software on that computer, etc.). To say he was "arrested for installing keylogging software" to represent theft could be compared to saying a murderer was "arrested for buying a gun and ammo."

Using a computer to commit a crime is no different than just commiting the crime. There should be no elevated charge just because he used a computer and software instead of a forged check or stolen credit card.