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Life-Ruining Browser Hijackers
LehiNephi writes "If you're not diligent enough at whacking malware on your computer, you could end up in jail, whether or not you actually did something wrong. Hijacked browsers can not only annoy you with a never-ending string of pop-ups, they leave a less-than-virtuous browser history behind on your computer. This guy claims that some piece of malware hijacked his home page, opened an unstoppable chain of pop-ups, and filled his cache with porn. He now has to register as a sex offender, even though he denies that he did anything his computer says he did. Makes me glad for built in pop-up blocking in Mozilla."
Was the guys cache filled with child porn or something?
How does looking at porn make you a sex offender? If it's illegal then arrest me right now.
I seriously doubt that anything would be convicted as a sex offender just by a hisory of websites that his browser had been pointed to in the past. There has to be more to this than what we know.
I may be expecting too much here, but it seems logical to me that even the most clueless luser might suspect that something was amiss if a flood of porn started popping up out of nowhere and at least ask a literate friend what's up. Like the first poster, I'm a little suspicious that this type of problem could go unnoticed for very long.
Maybe. But do you want to bet your future on your lawyer convincing a skeptical judge and jury that it was a technology problem? After all, they have evidence that the pictures were on your machine, under your control. I don't think I'd want to bet my future on that.
Moral of the story - use pop-up blockers. Run AdAware. Run AV software. Get some software that wipes unused areas of your hard disk and "shreds" files you delete. Be paranoid.
And yes, in the "old" days I ran into the same problem that the person described in the artcile had, but I was savvy enough to clear up my machine, wipe out the last vestige of those files and run software to wipe the unused area of the hard disk with random data.
Where you don't need to do anything damaging or hurtful to commit a crime, just have the wrong information on your computer.
Yay for removal of civil liberties. Oh did the sites any of the images came from get sued? Of course not, it's not their fault they're publishing illegal material (if it even is illegal).
Because we all know looking at pictures is bad. I mean people always do bad things they see in pictures, right? I just can't wait until they finish the thought listening machine so we won't even need pictures for evidence. It'll just be "Hey you! You had bad thoughts about that person, you're obviously going to act on them, get in jail!" Or "Hey you, you thought about doing drugs! We can't have people using untaxed substances to enjoy themselves without hurting others, get in jail so you can learn to become a good consumer of only the harmful products our society approves of and generates money from at the expense of public health!" or "Hey you! You thought the person in charge of this country might be wrong! That's obviously not allowed, come here so we can kill you!"
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
The problem is that it's not easy to "prove". File creation dates can be manipulated pretty easily.
Now is it easy for prosecutors to essentially figure out? Yes. But then you are at the mercy of whether the DA wants to make 'an example' of you, regardless of whether you actually committed the crime.
This happens more often than you might think. It's a pride thing. Furthermore, in certain jurisdictions, it's a job performance thing too -- prosecutors are evaluated on their conviction percentage.
Trust me. No matter how obvious the facts are, the best way to stay out of the system is to never get in it at all. Miscarriage of justice isn't just something that happens in Iraq.
I have a hard time believing they charged someone with downloading kiddie-porn when all that really happened was he saw some pop-ups, like you and I (unfortunately) see a million times a day.
Yes, because we all know that the feds are only interested in charging criminals and never ever arrest someone for the newsworthiness of their arrest. Just ask Richard Jewell
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
For example, here's an absolute rule:
If there is no intent, there should be no crime.
And here's some common sense: while you can deduce intent from physical evidence and documented actions, it's the evidence and actions of the suspect that make the crime, not the idea. What your rule demands is that we prosecute thought crimes, and only thought crimes.
The man probably didn't want to open up the string of popups,
That's a good guess, but how accurate is it? How trustworthy is it? How sure can you be that the man did not want to open all these pop-ups (either for their own sake, or as an acceptable side effect of some other intentional act)? Shouldn't you be looking at the actual physical evidence and documented activity, in order to determine what crime has been committed, and by whom? Basing your investigation on a wild-ass guess about the ideas in the head of the suspect doesn't seem very much like common sense to me.
therefor is not responsible for this.
Once again, absolute rules screw common sense.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Being labeled as a "sex offender" will ruin your life forever in America. Once your labeled, I don't think there is anyway of getting rid of this title. I call it a title because it's exactly that. Try getting a job with a future employer. Try finding a place to live. Try anything. Once you're labeled, the stigma ostracizes you from the rest of society. It's enough to make you flee from the country, or commit suicide.
I guess what I'm getting at is this. If your going to be labeled as a "sex offender". The government better damn well have compelling evidence to label you as one. And I don't think having porn on your computer counts. Sex is natural and part of human nature. It's only when it becomes "offensive" to others around you that's at question.
Life is not for the lazy.
Ok, here's what prolly happened:
- Dude with his drive in two partitions downloads a bunch of pr0n and stores it on
/dev/hda2 (or Windoze equivalent) - Porn-viewing dude decides to sell his computer on eBay.
- Realizes that he can't very well sell it to someone when it's got child pr0n on it or he'll be goin' to jail
- Nukes
/dev/hda2 partition and thinks "ok, it's gone now. I'm in the clear". - Sells it to "Jack"
- Jack gets his computer analyzed by the cops.
- Jack gets fucked by the system.
Can I be a reporter now?"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Oh, yeah. Let's play another round of "blame the victem"! Excuse me while I kick you in the Jimmies.
I've seen browsers get hijacked like this from people who I know for a fact were not looking at porn. I've had to clean a lot of them out at my job and I know from looking at the firewall's logs that these people were not visiting porn sites before their browsers got hijacked.
And yes, you ARE condining this poor bastard being marked as a sex offender.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
It doesn't matter if there's evidence that the defendant is not guilty. In fact, they're probably inclined to ignore any they find.
Their job is to attempt to prove to a judge or jury that the evidence that the defendant is outweighs the evidence that he isn't. And, unfortunately, a lot of people don't have a problem with "those nasty criminals" being convicted on quetionably evidence.
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Some of the images were found in unallocated file space, and would have to have been placed there deliberately since cached images from browsing sessions wouldn't have been stored in unallocated space.
When I hear "unallocated space", I think of, i.e., unformatted filesystems, unpartitioned hard drives, etc... Maybe they're referring to "deleted" files? A file would end up there from the cache if he clicked on the "empty cache" button fer chrissakes.
So, shall we vote whether to consider this poor shmuck the first casualty in Ashcroft's "War on pr0n?"
I don't read anything into the fact that they were negotiating with the DA on a plea bargain, that's pretty standard. And you can criticize his legal advice, but the sad thing is, it was probably correct. Trying to build this defense case would be extremely difficult, and was likely beyond this guy's financial means. And once the people in the system believe that you are a sex offendor, you will have *no* margin of error.
Not to say that this isn't all BS; but you can't tell that from this synopsis.
He decided to just watch the government, and kind of scale it down to size, and run his life that way. --Laurie Anderson
Oh, yeh, that's right - if Microsoft did actually do this, they'd just absorb another anti-trust suit and get accused of using their 'monopoly' to put all those hard working anti-virus/anti-spyware companies out of business.
One big problem is that Microsoft's custom security options are either vague or misleading. If you disable ActiveX, you can't run Windows Update, so you're left with leaving vulnerable systems enabled in places where you would prefer not. MS has a number of different names for different enabled/disabled features: active scripting, activeX, MicrosoftVM, data sources across domains... most people have no idea what this means. They can't merely say "disable Javascript", they have to bundle divergent services into misnamed categories making it difficult to figure out how to secure your browser or even what you're doing.
Internet Explorer's deliberately obtuse configuration interface is mostly responsible for this mess. Microsoft could add more options described in a more specific manner so users could make informed decisions over what features they want to enable/disable. Microsoft has apparently deliberately chosen to obfusicate their security options, specifically to avoid any user's finding easy ways to enable the more-secure non-Microsoft technology over the less-secure Microsoft "features."
Until lawyers get technically savvy, laws affecting technology will be terrible.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
"We found the gun, and the bullets match the ones found in the body. Additionally, there was video evidence of the killing, and we found traces of the victims blood on his shirt. He claims he was visiting his mother at the time, and has no idea about the blood and the bullets. If he was out of state, his mother should be able to verify his claim"
"Outragous! Whatever happened to 'innocent until proven guilty'???"
For those of you who don't get the example, nothing happened to "innocent until proven guilty." The phrase means that, up until you have been proven guilty, you are not to be treated as though you are guilty. What it does NOT mean, despite what everybody seems to think it means, is that you are not required to prove your innocence. You most certainly are. However, the prosecution is required to prove your guilt. If the proof is so flimsy that you do not have to defend yourself, it most likely would not go to trial. However, if the proof against you is solid, you will be convited unless you prove your innocence. Optimally, it would not be possible to prove somebody's guilt unless they were, infact, guilty. However, the world is not perfect. There are instances where evidence indicates you did something that you did not. In those cases, you can and should present an alternative explanation of the evidence. Presumption of innocence does not enter into it. This guy is not at all required to prove that a virus/trojan/worm downloaded the pornography. However, there is 100% solid evidence that he had said child pornography in his possession. If he does not prove his innocence, this is a sufficient proof of guilt.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Any individual - most individuals, even - won't have any change of behaviour, but a measurable number will buy the advertised product because they saw the ad.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
If this was the case, why haven't I got a giant stack of tampons here? I'm a guy, I don't use them, but I see all these advertisements for them, and by your logic I'm therefore compelled to buy them.
Unfortunately your logic simplifies things too much. You don't see an ad for shampoo, run out to the store and buy Head and Shoulders, and return home just in time to see an ad for Zest. No, there is a higher level at work here in rational people. An ad for Brand X Foo works because you need Foo and because you saw the ad for Brand X. These two combined cause you to act. I suspect even in irrational people something similar occurs, except that for those people up late nights compulsively dialing every toll free infomercial number, seeing the product also produces a need for the product.
Likewise, playing quake doesn't make you go out and kill people. You feel a need to kill people, then the fact that you play quake perhaps influences the manner of murder.
This isn't meant to condone child pr0n, as some child is being victimized to produce that stuff, but perpetuating this junk even to attack child pornography is wrong.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Umm, yes, they had chemical weapons. Yes, they were willing to use them.
But do you really think that the U.S. Congress (or foreign governments) would have -ever- been willing to support a war if the only weapons we could "prove" existed were nerve gas launched from a SS-1 Scud missle (range of 700 miles or so)?
Plus you even bring up the possibility that they -did- destroy those weapons after Gulf War I. Gulf War II was sold on the premise that not only did they not do so but that they were in possession of even stronger weapons.
Was Husseing probably interested in sourcing larger weapons? Sure, but the point is he didn't from what every investigation has found. And by now some traces of nuclear devices and/or longer range missiles should have been found.
And if you do research into -why- those foreign countries thought Iraq had such weapons, you would find it was due to intelligence from the U.S. and G.B. that has proven to at least have been faulty if not fraudulent.
Should Hussein have been removed from power? Yep. But if the U.S. (of which I am a voting citizen) expects the rest of the world to behave in accordance to the U.N. and various treaties, we kind of need to lead by example. If GWB had been willing to wait another 6 months I believe he would have gotten the U.N. to throw in. And since there weren't significant WMD threats, the wait wouldn't have hurt the U.S.
Oh and don't forget the whole mess about going after Iraq because of 9/11, which has been proven to be tenuous if not plain wrong. If we wanted to take out the people who perpetrated 9/11 we should have gone to Saudi Arabia (Wahabism was the spark and support for Al-Qaeda) and the Phillipines (where Al-Qaeda cells are known to lurk and launch).
BTW, if you're going to say "Fuck you." it just proves that you're reacting from your own hatred, especially when you aren't willing to post from a logged-in account and have to be an AC.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
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The men wisely chose to fight the charges, and both the brother and the husband ultimately were completely exonerated. The husband won custody of the children, and the accuser has lost all credibility.
They were lucky, but I have to wonder, were they really completely exonerated? Legally I'm sure they were, but in the court of public opinion, did everyone hear about the exoneration? Did they believe it? I highly suspect the answer to both will be no.-
Playing the pedophilia card has become a weapon for vicious and cynical people; it's easy to horrify juries with graphic descriptions of pedophilia, and children can be coached to say almost anything. Lives have been ruined, careers destroyed, and children traumatized almost as much as if true pedophilia had occurred.
This is very true, and the major problem is that the mere playing of the card is all that's needed to destroy a person's entire life. No proof of guilt needed. The public all hears about it on the news (and the news media LOVES to report these things, very sensational you know) and that's it, the guy's a pedophile and they'll never think differently.Many people win the legal battle and lose the war big time. They end up having to move, change their name, etc. just to live a normal live -- even though they were never convicted (and in some cases even charged) with a crime.
This is sadly a horrid abuse of our justice system. I keep hoping someone whose life was ruined in a case like this will turn around and sue their accuser and the media for it. I'm not one to normally advocate lawsuits, but these people's lives are ruined by the media sensationalizing things. Since it's not sensational (or even interesting apparently) to report when the charges are dropped, the case is lost, the accuser found to have made it all up, etc. the media almost never reports about the exonerations of acussed pedophiles. Perhaps losing a hefty lawsuit or two would get them to either 1) start reporting the exonerations with as much vigor as the accusations, or 2) stop reporting things before there's at LEAST a charge filed. Either of those would help immensely. Sure there'll be those who hear about the exonerations and not believe them, but if they're regularly reported the harmful affects of the accusations would be mostly negated. (And I suspect a lot of people would be surprised to find out how many acussed of these types of things turn out to be innocent.)
On the bright side, if that happened, the ability to play the pedophile card irresponsibly would probably mostly stop. After all if the ability of it to harm innocents goes away, it's of no use to those that currently abuse it.
After witnessing this, I will certainly be migrating my parents and other relatives to Linux/Mozilla as soon as I can.
Some folks will probably reply that when Linux gets more common, there will be crapware for linux too. This may or may not be the case (depends on whether you buy the "windows gets attacked because it's popular" argument). In any case, switching to linux will at least buy some time, since it will take a while for linux to get the user base required to make it a target for crapware.
Ditto for Mac.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
A serious (and somewhat general, since you're here) question:
/var/log files)? I know you said you haven't dealt with sex crime_internet cases, but I'm more interested in the IT cases overall.
How much ignorance do/have you seen with regards to somewhat obscure computer knowledge such as browser caches (or tmp files, or
Who does the presiding judge tend to believe - those who can present the case in the terms the judge can understand, or the experts who really are cognizant of the technology involved? Is there a significant ratio?
(I know they are not mutually exclusive, I'm wondering about the cases where they weren't, which in IT patent cases seem to be too often.)
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Think about it. If you exercise your right to trial by jury, and lose, you may well end up with a much worse sentence. What this amounts to is the government punishing us for exercising our rights! Allow me to requote Chief Judge William G. Young of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts, from an excellent article (warning PDF) at theCato Institute.
For completeness, there is a companion article in favor of plea bargains.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
This is way off. Microsoft were not slapped with the web browser anti-trust lawsuit because they bundled IE. The lawsuit was because of clear anti-competitive behaviour:
If Microsoft were to fix the security / virus / spyware related problems in Windows, this would not necessarily be an anti-trust issue. It would all depend on whether they used their monopoly position unfairly.
To quote from the article:
Brian Rothery, a former IBM systems engineer who has been researching Jack's claims, pointed out that a significant portion of the images and URLs cited in the arrest papers are from fairly tame nudist sites, as well as adult sites that do not contain illegal materials.
He said that however the pornography arrived on Jack's computer, "the evidence wasn't handled properly, and his lawyer did not do his job."
Jack said he opted not to fight the charge because his lawyer told him he would probably receive a harsher sentence if he went to trial.
It seems he was scared into just accepting whatever was handed to him. It never went to trial, never in front of any jury. I know the feeling...I was in a similar situation. Not from pornography, but something else. I didn't bother fighting it due to lack of resources:
"The police raided my house on Sept. 17, 2002," said "Jack," who came to the United States from the former Soviet Union as a political refugee, and has requested that his name not be published. "Nobody gave me a chance to explain. I was told by judge and prosecutor that I will get years in prison if I go to trial. After negotiations through my lawyer I got 180 days in an adult correctional facility. I was imprisoned for 20 days and then released under the Electronic Home Monitoring scheme. I now have a felony sex-criminal record, and the court ordered me to register as a predatory sex offender for 10 years."
Basically, this guy was afraid of something worse happening, so he didn't fight it at all...
"They are very eager to get conviction," Jack said. "Nobody can fight those powers.
He knows that he can't fight a system stacked against him. I wonder if he had a "public defender".
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
Heres how you would plea to something this heinous.
First let me say that as everyone knows, here in america, you entitled to a speedy trial.
What the right to a "speedy trial" means is, unless you waive that right, the trial process can last no longer than 6 months.
Once you're taken into custody and charged with a serious crime, these are your only options:
1) Bail Out. Go to trial.
Pay the bail.
Get out of jail.
Waive your right to a speedy trial.
Live a somewhat normal life until a jury rules.
Give your legal team time to present a convincing argument.
2) Stay in jail. Go to trial.
You cannot afford to bail, you stay in jail for at least 6 months.
6 months of being in jail will lose you your job, apartment, etc. Any loans you are paying on a month to month will default.
If you are found innocent at your trial you get 6mo's credit towards your next sentence should you get arrested again.
If you are found guilty you probably go from jail to prison.
3) Cop a plea.
If its your first offense, you dont have very much of a record, etc. The prosecution may offer you a "deal".
e.g. Plead guilty to a felony, get out of jail NOW, get 1-3 years probation, and credit for time served, possibly a treatment program, etc.
At this point, you've been in jail for weeks, if not months.
You know you're going to be in jail for 6mos to god-knows-how-long-you-could-go-to-prison if you are sentenced by a jury.
Sure a few months in jail doesnt sound that bad, until you have to do it yourself.
You're in, you know all your stuff will have been tossed out, auctioned off, or reposessed by the time you get out.
You live in a cell, or a tank with a bunch of thugs, smelly ass bums, junkie's kicking herion, etc.
Theres no privacy, you shit shower and shave in front of whoevers around.
The whole time you're wondering if you might end up spending the next X number of years this way...
That plea bargain deal starts sounding REALLY good...
Once malware is running on your system, it chooses what to do -- or rather, it's author chooses to do. Sure there are possible defenses to malware, but none of them are foolproof. The vast majority of Internet users are spread eagle on the information superhiway, relying on Bill Gates to guard their anus.
In fact, there is no way to prove that any activity originating from a computer system was produced by the user at that computer system short of either filming them doing it (and you gotta love digital film folks!) or hooking up a device to their brain. (Wait a few years for that.)
Not convinced? A trojan can install itself without detection, do whatever the hell it pleases, and cover its tracks completely. All it needs are the right holes, and if you don't believe the holes are there to be found then you obviously don't read the news. Just imagine if that teenager from Germany caught this last week had decided his worm should mail death threats to public officials, or download illegal pictures, before shredding itself completely off the hard drive after propagating. The malware writers have, on the whole, been very very kind and very very stupid so far people; well, at least the trojans/worms/viruses/spyware we know about.
Even going beyond this, there's always the question of physical security on a machine. If someone can access a computer physically, chances are they can plant whatever they want to on it, AND YOU WONT BE ABLE TO DISTINGUISH IT FROM NON-PLANTED EVIDENCE. That, my friends, sucks.
The digital world is a scarey scarey place. Gone are the physical evidence trails. And don't think prosecuters dislike this new domain; it makes their job easier, not harder. Prosecuters don't have to consider the very real possibility that the actions of a computer system were hijacked. They only have to MAKE THINGS TERRIFYING ENOUGH for you to force you into the only rational decision; to take the deal, to sell out the truth and your rights to a jury trial because the cost of trying to convince someone on a jury that a completely untraceable event is possible in this digital world, something tantamount to "magic" in the real world happened. Good luck!
Cheers and remember, there's really no way you can prove I posted this
It seems he was scared into just accepting whatever was handed to him. It never went to trial, never in front of any jury. I know the feeling...I was in a similar situation. Not from pornography, but something else. I didn't bother fighting it due to lack of resources:
This is more of a "lawyer problem" than a computer problem. There are cases of this kind of thing happening with people accused of all sorts of things.
He knows that he can't fight a system stacked against him. I wonder if he had a "public defender".
One who would prefer that his/her clients plead guilty or "plea bargin" rather than actually take any case to trial. In some cases this appears to be the specific policy of law firms. The people who tend to be "railroaded" in such cases are those unable to afford to pay their own lawyer and who are not habitual criminals (these tend to know how to "play the system".)
In order to make any sense of this, we need to understand a bit about psychology. Men today are basically -- and with good reason -- shit-scared of being accused of any sexual offence, but especially paedophilia. You only have to look at the news reports on TV and in the papers.
So we live in denial. We try to pretend there is no such thing. But as soon as a real, live person is discovered who is suspected of being a paedophile, then a defensive mechanism which dates back to cave-man times kicks in. We are so desperate not to be that suspect, because we are doubly afraid -- revulsion at the thought that we might be capable of doing that, plus fear of the punishment we are conditioned to expect. All the time, we are exposed through the media to a gamut of images such as Britney Spears dancing erotically in clothing reminiscent of school uniform. And children -- especially girls {Western society has pretty much abandoned boys altogether, but that's another story} -- are adopting what would traditionally have been seen as the trappings of adulthood at a much younger age. These conditions are an ideal breeding ground for irrational behaviour.
People attack suspected paedophiles because they don't want to be suspected of paedophilia themselves; and if you are in a vigilante mob, baying for blood with the rest of them, then obviously nobody else in that mob thinks you would make a good next victim.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!