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The Virus Did It

Posted by michael on from the dangers-of-running-insecure-operating-systems dept.

scubacuda writes "The Inquirer and Get Reading report that a UK man accused of having pornographic pictures of kids on his computer was acquitted after a court heard that his machine was infected with a Trojan on his PC which probably auto-downloaded the images. (In light of moves like Operation Ore, we'll probably hear more defenses like this.)"

13 of 373 comments (clear)

  1. Insanity by dledeaux · · Score: 5, Funny

    Human: I plead insanity! I wasn't aware of my actions at the time that I was doing them. I can't be held responsible.

    Computer: I plead trojan. I wasn't aware of my actions at the time that I was doing them. I can't be held responsible.

    1. Re:Insanity by Dogun · · Score: 5, Informative

      Forgive the sound of the dying giraffe, but I have to say that the insanity defense is no joke. NGRI is something under constant attack by people who don't really understand it.

      Consider this: you are driving your car. you hit a baby, baby dies. You weren't driving particularly recklessly, under the speedlimit, visibility was just low. It's sad and it happens.
      Consider this: you are drunk, driving your car. And by drunk, I mean you are impaired. You aren't driving particularly recklessly, but the same thing as above happens.

      Now, this doesn't apply to NGRI directly, but consider this: the circumstances around a crime impact the meaning of it. Both of those situations flat out suck, but the argument is that you were being especially irresponsible in the second case, but not in the first.

      Let's say you are sane and you kill a guy named Sam. (Sorry, Sam.) He kicked your dog, and now you're going to pump his head full of lead and do some of that stuff out of the first scene of "Way of the Gun".

      Now, consider case two: you are insane, and you believe that Jodie Foster is in love with you and tells you to do things, and you feel complied to do so. You are not even aware of your delusion, and the fact that you are having the delusion implies that a great deal of your judgement is impaired. In fact, you could say that you didn't know what you were doing - you can still remember doing them, but you thought you were killing the martian high leader of the invasion force or something. In this case, are you responsible for killing a man, or are you responsible for falling for a delusion, which to you seemed very, very real.

      I argue that in this case, you are not guilty of the crime you are charged with because you frankly were not in control of your reality.

      And ultimately, if you look up statistics on the defense, you'll find that it is hardly ever used, does not work when it should, and that the mean time spent incarcerated in mental hostpitals by NGRI people is higher than the mean time spent in prison for the same crime.

      There is actually a famous case where a guy shot somebody very important under the compulsion of one of his delusionary characters and was found not guilty by reason of insanity, who is now sitting, treated, recovered, in a mental hospital, getting clean review after clean review and not being released by the board that controlls his release.

      Whine as much as you want about the implications of this trojan defense, but don't equate it or compare it to the not guilty be reason of insanity defense. They are quite different.

      Also, note that it *IS* possible that a trojan's job would be to search for child pornography on Kazaa or something. Ultimately it'll probably just pull up legit porn, but somebody COULD design such a program.

      Now, granted that, the prosecution should have made a serious attempt to disprove the defendants claims. I suspect they did otherwise.

  2. What's the Point... by Valthonis · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...of making a virus that downloads child pr0n onto a remote computer? I thought virii were created to wreak havoc, not frame random computer users... or am I wrong? And furthermore, if a jury can believe this defense, what's to keep all the imminent RIAA and MPAA suits from being defused by the same argument? FIRST POST! WOO!!

    --
    "Life in every breath... that is bushido"
    1. Re:What's the Point... by mindaktiviti · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "...of making a virus that downloads child pr0n onto a remote computer? I thought virii were created to wreak havoc, not frame random computer users... or am I wrong? And furthermore, if a jury can believe this defense, what's to keep all the imminent RIAA and MPAA suits from being defused by the same argument? FIRST POST! WOO!! "

      Didn't wreak havoc? The guy lost his 500 pounds a day job, didn't work for two years, got his named associated with child pornography...this trojan already made him lose out on two years of his own life. I'd say that constitutes as wreaking havoc.

  3. Sounded fishy at first... by Hee+Hee+Hee · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This sounded fishy at first, until I saw
    "The specialist found the day before the images were downloaded the program was implemented, so there's a direct correlation between them,"
    in the second article cited. Kinda makes you want to update your virus detection/bot detection/firewall/etc, doesn't it?
    --
    - Bill
  4. I must have lots of viruses.... by hoggoth · · Score: 5, Funny

    They've been downloading MP3s, porn, movies, all kinds of stuff I am not aware of!

    --
    - For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat /dev/random (may take some time)
  5. UK Law... by MrBandersnatch · · Score: 5, Insightful
    In the run up to the case, according to the Reading Evening Post, Mr Schofield suffered vigilante attacks and had to first hide in his home then move away to avoid continued attacks

    Yet another example of why the decision to allow defendants in criminal trials to be named was a bad decision *sigh*.

    As to the story - sounds strange that a trojan would do that unless someone was using his machine as a proxy and in that case why would the images be cached on his system?

  6. he lived near me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    This bloke lived near me, he was hounded out of his home by ignorant fuckwits who presume that becuase somebody lives with their mother and father (after the age of 18) and is being done for paedophile images, the must be guilty.

    It's a bit of a wake up call to the moronic masses that people can be innocent as well as guilty!

  7. Acquitted - but... by Chocaholic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The problem this guy is going to face is that, despite his conviction, the prevailing mood in the UK is such that he will still find himself stigmatised for a very long time.

    As he found out from the vigilante attacks before his trial, the maxim "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't seem to apply for some people any more - the witch hunts led by certain newspapers mean that any slight suggestion of paedophilia turns the accused into an immediate fugitive.

    Therefore, though it's very kind of the Crown Prosecution Service to accept this explanation at trial, why did they wait before it was up before a judge with all the attendant publicity before letting him off the hook?

    In the minds of some people as well, there's going to be an attitude of "that's right, blame it on the computer - he would say that, wouldn't he?". Technology-based defences simply don't hold water for a lot of non-technical people - which with the increasing number of technological offences being put to juries is quite a worry.

    So, this guy will still be stigmatised as a paedophile, all for the price of some virus checking software...

  8. Bye bye Symantec... by dreadpiratemark · · Score: 5, Funny

    I gotta keep this short 'cause I have to go uninstall Symantec Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition to make sure that my company lawyers have a good defense for some of our employees.... Hell, I might just turn off our firewall and load MS Backoffice for an OS as long as we're looking to give more people/programs easy access.

  9. It's possible. I've seen it! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    2001-12-25 02:34:02 Porn trojan virus? (articles,security) (rejected)

    I've seen and disinfected a laptop of a friend who was infected with a virus that downloaded porn pages in the background whenever he connected to the internet. I guess it was to collect link credits. His history and cache would fill up with porn crap and he claimed to not be visiting the sites. At first I didn't believe him (obviously) and was surprised when I saw the behavior for myself. Beware!

  10. My experience� by (H)elix1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I see a lot of comments about - wink, wink - sure it was the virus, or dumb ass for executing a Trojan.

    My first lesson with an improperly configured Linux box outside the firewall was when my ISP called asking about some insane bandwidth use. What? I checked the box and it seemed fine. Found out the traffic was on FTP, which I was not using. Sure enough, tons of porn and other files were getting uploaded and downloaded... all the files in a hidden directory. The box was owned, and I ended up rebuilding from scratch, this time leaving services off I did not actually use and patching some of the services I did. Than I discovered ssh and a few other key insights that were new to me.

    I cannot believe I am the only one this kind of thing happened to...

    --
    +++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
  11. No Judge... by Spleen · · Score: 5, Funny

    I didn't notice the folder named "Child Porn" and all the neatly arranged subfolders inside of "My Documents".