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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.
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.
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.
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?"
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."
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.
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.
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!