Slashdot Mirror
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."
The Browser made me do it!!!
I would think the justice department would be able to see if all the images in the cache were dated from that one single event or if they were spread over time. If he's telling the truth, it should be easy to prove.
A very convenient excuse.
He was probably looking at porn in the first place. Not that I think that condones him being a register sex offender. But that was probably what started his sexual onslaught. (A lot of the porn sites love browser tricks, just one more reason for the avid geek to use Mozilla.)
While I respect this guys rights and wouldn't presume to accuse him of anything, I certainly cannot defend him without reading the court transcripts. ANYONE who was caught in the act of downloading kiddie porn would claim their PC was "hi-jacked" so I don't think this is a defense of any kind, in and of itself. I don't think the feds are technically literate, but I also don't think they're fools. 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. Something else took place here.
After all, how often do you see pop-ups with child porn on 'em? I certainly know I never do, even when I'm forced to use IE
The dude in question claims that he bought the computer on eBay, which is a whole other ball of wax. If you buy a used computer, and can prove you did so, are you legally responsible for what might have been on it when you bought it?
I totally have no idea what the right answer to that would be.
I love Mozilla Firefox, love it. The AdBlock plugin and a custom host file keep me free of almost all ads, flash banners, and otherwise annoying Internet ads.
However, we like to preach about just switch and all your problems go away. For the most part that holds true, a switch to Linux, or even just Mozilla infinitely improves the quality of the computer.
However, most of the spyware comes as a result of user initiated stupidity or ignorance.
Now I understand stupid default choices by Microsoft and browser cause most of these problems, but if Linux does become a major player on the desktop (god willing) I think we will see more crappy scumware. Linux isn't a magic pill, just a better designed OS. It isn't idiot proof.
Right now I'm going to keep on recommending Firefox and keep getting signatures to get my school to, but in the future, I hope at least most of these problems will go away with the switch to linux (but I doubt it).
Heh, last time I visited my parents my mom complained about all the porno pop-ups. I was like *holy shit* when she showed me what was going on.
:>)
:>)
Ran ad aware and she had about 280 spyware/crapware programs on her PC (goddam elf blowling program
After we ran that and Search and Destroy, installed Mozilla and ZoneAlarm her system runs much better.
I can see a shred of thruth in this guy's story, but all my porno is placed on my system on purpose (and no, no kiddie stuff
-mb
No, it doesn't have much to do with me, except that I'm the resident antispyware guy at my school. That, and I'm a Helper on SWI.
I also had to break the news to the guy that he got canned. Let me tell you, there's nothing to bring your day down like that.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
There has to be more to this than what we know
My thoughts entirely. The first question I asked myself was WHY were the Feds raiding his house in the first place?
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
Animal porn popup causes guy to lose his job and ruins his life. Farmsluts
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
The 4 rules of karma whoredom:
1. After writing a stupid joke write "It's Funny, Laugh!"
2. Ask a retarded question about something that is painfully described in the article.
3. Respond to your own post with "MOD UP PARENT!"
4. Post a statement high up in a discussion that has nothing to do with the parent post to get visibility.
Are you trying to say he is a karma whore because of rule 2?
Out of interest, when I rebuild my home server recently, I installed a fresh Windows XP (with SP1(!)), but nothing else. Then pointed my browser at www.netants.com (that site would probably deserve a good whacking) and sat back and watched the show.
Within five minutes, there was porn everywhere. The browser homepage (which also downloaded new tasty bits of spyware whenever the browser was launched), the favorites (it would take a determined smut-lover months to accumulate a list of porn sites that long!), the browser history, lots of links on the desktop, porn quick-bars, search bars, the start menu, and every other piece of mal-, spy-, ad- and crapware under the sun.
The scary thing is, I did not click on any buttons, links or otherwise. The website simply exploited IE flaws to install all this crap.
I then ran ad-aware and spybot search and destroy and the amount of shit that had been installed in about five minutes was absolutely staggering! After that, I continued using the machine for a few minutes, but could not shake the feeling that there was still a fair amount of *ware left on the box. I had to repartition, reformat and take a shower to feel clean again.
So it would be all too easy for Joe User, who does not quite grasp the concept of IT security in general and the necessity to upgrade in particular, to stumble upon a site like that and catch all that junk. After witnessing this, I will certainly be migrating my parents and other relatives to Linux/Mozilla as soon as I can.
I have now prepared an old laptop that I can restore quickly by re-ghosting with a virgin XP install. Every time I need to impress the importance of updating, configuring your system properly and generally staying away from MS software, I take the laptop along, open abovementioned site and ask people to clean up the machine. Normally they give up in disgust after firing up IE for the first time. Might be an idea to do that in court, too.
I asked for a refund - and got my monkey back.
I had something like this happen to me, but fortunately I wasn't arrested or fired: One day a while back I decided to clean up my Windoze computer a bit and logged into the default account, which I hadn't logged into in a long, long time -- typically I log into my own account. There were a few shortcuts on the desktop that I hadn't remembered puting there, so I double clicked on one of them and it took me to a kiddie porn site. I was not amused. The other shortcuts were also to kiddie porn sites.
I called up my ex-girlfriend, since she was the only other person who had ever used this computer, and I started ranting at her about how could she have been so cruel as to play that kind of practical joke on me. She clearly had no idea, however, what I was talking about.
So, it must have been some sort of virus, worm, trojan horse, or web-based vandalism that put those links there. Thank goodness I found them before letting a guest use the default account!
|>oug
Its pretty stupid that we've got to the stage where simple web scripting can have so much control over your browser/computer. It seems that javascript for example was designed with no regard to security, or more likely badly implemented by the likes of Microsoft. The plain and simple fact is your browser should stop bad scripts and/or ask you if you want to allow something, its certainly not rocket science to implement that people come on - were talking "if script wants to open/close a window or go somewhere, ask user first" thats about 3 lines of code that should have been implemented back in IE 3, why wasn't it?
To a certain extent its now appearing, IE will tell you "This website wants to close a window, do you want to allow it?" too little too late. Most other browsers have built-in pop-up blocking but even they took their time. Its basic security-101 that if you're dealing with a script that can be run by anyone you restrict what it can do. Same thing goes for Microsoft Outlook VB scripting. If people implementing these things weren't idiots we would have actually gone through the 90's with out annoying pop-ups and Outlook worms!!!! can you believe that??!? Microsoft is pretty much single-handedly responsible for opening these holes and for nearly a decade no-one has pointed fingers!!! Can i even add any more exclamation points or question marks?!?!?!?! Ok so its not just MS but mostly it is, given their browser share.
Other than web scripting/activeX etc. etc. which could be easily secured, there's real OS level holes, and tricking users into downloading and running things. Again who do we all need to point at? I don't expect every computer user to know that downloading random programs can be bad, but at the very least warn them! or at least run that program with limited permissions automatically unless they override it!
I just cant understand why all this is allowed to happen? someone please explain?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Security expert Bruce Schneier has talked about what he calls the trojan defense. He mentions several cases in which an illegal action was traced to a specific computer system, but the individual who was at the system claimed that a trojan horse was responsible for the action. In one case, an individual was suspected of launching a distributed denial of service attack, but they were acquitted after arguing that a trojan was responsible. In two other cases, individuals were charged with downloading illegal porn but were able to get the charges cleared via the trojan defense. Bruce Schneier supports the idea of this defense, but others might not.
mmmmm.... F-Prot... Run it on a 200MHz Pentium with 64MB of RAM and you wouldn't know it was there. Small program, small memory usage, and updated almost twice a day.
*twitch*
http://plextor.bounceme.net/
No I'm not going to link it; you can paste it yourself. WARNING, it goes to a browser hijacker that puts up a cascade of goatse.cx variety shock pictures. Not work safe. It completely wedged Mozilla 1.6 when I clicked on it. I didn't try in 1.7. Blecccch. If you look at it, don't say I didn't warn you. Note that if you turn off Javascript, you just see a blank page.
The JS in it also tries to capture the text from your clipboard and send it to the remote server, though I hope Mozilla isn't stupid enough to let THAT operation work.
These days, any combination of innocent things can make a trial by jury a very dangerous thing for an innocent person.
Case in point. Say a neighbor asks if his kid can come over to my house one afternoon for help with his math homework or something. Say the kid isn't as well adjusted as I thought, and tells everyone I touched him.
Well, that alone means I am now guilty in todays world. But enter the detectives. They take my PC and find that I have some porn in my cache. Most of it is adult porn which is bad enough. But then they go and do ID checks on some of the pics and turns out the girls were mature looking 16 year olds. Fuck, now I'm just sick- a true pedophile.
By now, the community has been told who I am. There are posters up in my neighborhood. My employer fires me. Even if I don't get convicted for some reason, my life is still over. And if I do get convicted, I'm now taking it in the butt in some federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. In which case I'd probably kill myself.
Anybody can disagree with me if they like, but this kind of shit isn't a stretch. The story was bad enough even if I didn't have porn on my box, but that fact just kind of seals the deal.
The sad state of affairs in today's world is why I make it a policy to never be near children outside of a large group situation. As long as there are lots of people around and you are never alone with the child, its awful hard to be accused of anything.
Also since almost all browser hijackers are designed for IE on Windows, I browse on a different platform with a different browser. Not a 100% guarantee, but every little bit helps.
Also remember to clean your browser caches often and clear off your hard drive of anything suspicious...
Unfortunately, a certain amount of what might seem like paranoia is just being prudent these days.
So he could have been punished even after he thought he rightfully deleted them!!! That's right folks, if they want they'll not only go thru your caches, but also run an undelete program against your disks! That's simply not fair!!! because at that point, your not "posessing" the material anymore.. even your intent was to remove them! that's a VERY dangerous slope!!
I have had zero viruses, worms, malware, spyware, etc... in the ten some years I've been using computers. Yes, this includes my Windows computers. It's possible.
But they apparantly still filed a police report.
Quite possible a false police report? Either way, it wouldn't be a bad idea for the DA to open up a little investigation into the company's IT department to see if they were withholding anything, or intentionally overlooked things.
Something doesn't smell right about this case. I've got a gut instinct that company of his found an opportunity to make an example of him for the infamous "no personal use" policy, and decided to exploit him... and it just got out of hand.
"In other news everyone in the world that's seen the news in the last 2 weeks is being arrested."
Also speaking of the news, it seems to me that violence and murder depected in the news and in movies is far more 'harmful, if harmful at all, then pictures of nude children.
It is a large double standard, images of some illegal activities (like murder) is ok, images of other illegal activities (beastiality, child porno) isn't.
In most areas you can legally record any conversation you a part of, i.e. in the same room as you.
Such recordings may or may not be able to be used in court, but never the less you'll have the truth of what happens in any situation well documented.
I also do not see why more people, including highschool students who are being bullied, do not bother to carry a recorder. It seems people suddenly are no longer assholes at the mere hint they are being recorded. Go figure.
a public attorney is awarded a wage, that is added to the fines of the convicted person. it isn't worth their time to go to trial and waste a bunch of money when they can just get the defendant to agree to a plea and at that point count on a thousand (or more) or so bucks payoff RE that case all for just visiting jail a few times and showing up in court once or twice.
from all the people i spoke to (yes, spoke to *in* jail who were serving time) it's common to sit down, and have them tell you you're looking at 3-4 years in prison (this of course varies) and recommend you just take a plea, all without even fucking asking about your side of the story.
yes, i'm bitter about it, but even moreso i'm angry for all the people whose lives get caught in the justive systems interminable process of rapid conviction commerce.
i can give you one rule, and it of course might be more obvious to some than others (like a frightened 18 year old in jail, or anyone else really) is that ALWAYS get a private defense attorney, NEVER trust your life with a public defender.
- I'd prefer not to.
I've seen a similar scenario up close, except that it was her husband and her brother that she accused of sexual abuse of the children. She had been going to a "religious" group for years and basically had been inducted into a cult; apparently when the husband started objecting to how she was siphoning money to these crooks they told her to make these false accusations in retaliation.
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. Before he was cleared, the brother, who had just finished eight years of grueling 120-hour weeks to build his medical career, spent about six months wondering if the next knock on the door was going to be the police come to lock him up and destroy his life in the blink of an eye.
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 not to say that there aren't plenty of pedophiles out there who need to be incarcerated to protect society, but it's such a travesty of justice that someone could easily wind up in jail or on a sex offenders list for the rest of his life as the result of a false accusation. If the accusee is innocent, plea bargaining is never a wise move, no matter what one's lawyer advises. Lawyers are out to help themselves, not their clients. Fight them, take lie detector tests, show them your home PC, whatever it takes to establish your innocence. This Russian guy was tragically mislead by a crook with a law degree; I hope he can somehow clear his name but he's into it pretty deeply now.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Bugger that. If you get a new machine, the very first thing you should do is.
NUKE and PAVE. Properly. Boot KNOPPIX for this one and run 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda' to completely wipe the drive. If you're really paranoid, do it several times.
This will get rid of whatever crap the last used had. Warez, kiddyporn, stolen government documents, whatever. You don't need it.
Once you have the base install sorted out, burn all the drivers your hardware requires onto a CD. Put zonealarm, adaware, spybot, java, flash, acrobat reader, etc on the same CD so you don't have to keep downloading them.. Keep a copy of TheOpenCD handy too, and you'll have most of the decent OSS software right there.
It only takes a few hours to completely reinstall Windows and a bunch of OSS apps, which is all most home users really need. And never mind windows updates; if you're behind a good firewall and not using MS's bundled swisscheeseware (IE/OE/WMP) then you probably don't need them.
If your computer is slowing down or acting weird, run spybot, norton, etc. If that doesn't fix it backup your data to a CD, and NUKE and PAVE.
If it's been a year since you last reinstalled; backup all your data and NUKE and PAVE again. You'll be surprised how much better things run on a fresh install.
Seriously. Why are people so afraid to format and reinstall their damned OS? It's not like it's difficult or anything!!
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
"It is not by any stretch of the imagination a victimless crime."
I've yet to see strong arguments or studies that child sexual behaviour with others is always necessarily harmful. (Few studies probably because anyone studying this issue is strongly frowned upon, esp. if you present any scientific evidence contrary to the mainstream perception that sexuality is harmful).
More to the point, if the standard of making images illegal is that there are 'victims' portrayed, then surely violent news and movies (or any other images of illegal activities) with victims must similarly be outlawed in your opinion.
Why was that guy even in the article the pictures weren't found in the cache they were in another part of his computer. Its pretty clear he was just lieing because its not easy to say "why yes I do look at child porn, ya got me!" This is not a real problem anyway because if somthing really were going around doing this with child porn more likely there would be more information about it out there. A program like that isn't going to just attack him and make him look at child porn. But that isn't even the point anyway because he had to have looked at the pictures if they weren't in the cache. If he really is innoccent (which is highly unlikely) the moral to the story is you see child porn on the internet tell the police. Even if it is a pop up ad.
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
On that page, there are about 50 links to the description of user.js
To make a long story short, the user.js file is not created by default. To create it, made a new file in your mozilla profile folder. On most systems the file would have a path as
Cheers.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
There were training rooms set up with several computers around the perimiter. One day during a training session, while no one was seated at it, out of apparently nowhere a popup ad featuring big bouncing naked breasts came up.
Since no one was using the machine at the time, it was obvious that it had been hijacked. If some poor sould had been sitting there at the time, they would have either been fired on the spot or placed on a "final warning" for it.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
You, my friend, have clearly have not been watching the news lately.
How is it not insightful? The horrifying thing is that what they're showing on the news is real. And I'm pretty sure that there's a lot that they aren't showing.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Here are some sites for those of you with enough memory to create a RAM drive for your cache:\
Link 1
Link 2
Link 3 (BEST)
The last one has MANY ways to create a ram disk. Just fyi actually. You know, if you dont' want people to find what you have done on your hard drive, just set up one of these and set the history/cache/etc to a ram drive and every time you reboot - PRESTO! No trace at all!...
Hope that helps.
Is there a way around the XPI install prompt, or are they relying on the ignorance of users who will OK to anything?
Which brings me to the question... if a program installed is popping up porno sites that include illegal material (kiddy, animal, etc), shouldn't the perveyor of that software (or the parent software which installed it etc etc) be liable?
I've not seen it myself, but I just recently ran into a low-tech computer user who proclaimed that his computer was getting popups of porn and, to quote, "sick shit, like kids and stuff."
I've had various sites sent me to popup hell with advertisements for so-called "lolita" porn, some of which is definately of dubious legality. I've not yet had any software do so, but then again I haven't accidentally installed such crapware in quite awhile.
If I were to be able to trace what were popping up the "sick shit," would I then be able to get a criminal investigation into the parent company. Moreso, could I do so without getting those with the actual material it downloaded (browser cache etc) nailed for having such things on their PC?
Am I the _only_ one that remembers the inspectors being let in, receiving cooperation?
I hope so, given that Blix himself testified Iraq was not giving full cooperation, as required by UN resolution, the cease-fire agreement, and international law.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt."
- _Atlas Shrugged_
I mis-typed the URL of my preferred search-engine, and ended up at a typo-squatting porn-site that proclaimed itself to be
"The official internet incest site" and filled my screen with a series of images best left undescribed.
It did the usual thing, you close one window and it opens another 2, and I was at work so after a few seconds I took the brute-force approach and turned off the power.
I pulled the network plug, re-started the computer, and fired up the browser, sure enough, the browser immediately tried to access the same site. It took me over an hour to clean the f**king thing off my PC, all the while being secretive about the whole thing because I didn't want to explain to the boss why I had these websites in my browser history.
And I couldn't even report the bastards to the cops, as there was an article in the paper a few months earlier about someone who had a similar experience, called the cops, and ended up facing criminal charges as they took his complaint as a 'confession' to the crime of downloading child porn. I never heard if he was convicted, but call me a coward if you like, I'd rather not try my luck with the court system.
So, nudge-nudge-wink-wink all you like, but it does happen, and one day it may happen to you.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
This information is correct, but impossible to do with anything less than a power user. With windows XP, You can't install games as a user, and if you install them as superuser then you have to manually tweak permissions to allow users access to them. It's a lose-lose. In l,inux, I can open my term and "su -" but in windows I can't do that at all, I'm just hosed when I try. I support a user who has stopped using administrator privaledges, but He's still gotten hijacked. The solution needs to be securer software.
Can I be a Luddite too?
I'm in charge of a mailshot for the Ski Club in the same town and I usually give these other guys a plug.
Until recently. I get an aguished call from a very nice lady working at a central bank. She clicked on the link and was faced with porn. I work at a major bank under an up to date patched XP with the guy that runs the beers site. I had no problem from Mozilla but when my colleague tried with IE, it replaced his home page with porn and then lots of pop-ups. It also installed something that reinstalled itself whenever he tried to change. Ironically, it turns out that this was promoting a system-cleaning utility.
My colleague had not put this on the web-site and the hoster denies ever putting anything like that up. We don't know what happened and a couple of days later it was gone. The thing is that it went straight past the defences of two major banks and was very embarassing.
Not only the local cache but squid would have been fllled with these images. Nasty for everyone.
The point is that yes, if someone looked at the dates on the cache, it could be traced to a single incident but in many places, you would have been thrown out by then.
See my journal, I write things there
I switched from Windows to an iMac with OS X last year. I have no problems with spyware, viruses, malware, whatever at home.
At work it is still a nightmare to deal with all the PC's I have to maintain - especailly the home PC that belongs to my boss. His kids are constantly downloading shit and installing it - sometimes without knowing.
Seriously. If the punishments are this hard, and it's easy as "the touch of a button" getting people convicted, you guys have a problem.
People getting killed for such abuse of the legalsystem might set the balance more straight, though.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Yes, yes they do. Still, that is because of stupidity on the part of the web designer.
There are plenty of sites that do the exact same thing on the server-side, hence no need for javascript. If a companies store does not work without javascript, I don't buy anything from them.
Netflix is a borderline website. Things like rating titles require javascript, but none of the other features do, so I can still use 95% of the functionality of the site without javascript... That's the only reason I'm still subscribed.
Yes, I know this isn't directly on-target, but javascript was mentioned, so I thought it a good place.
Regardless of this case, I have run into people who's home page has been set to a porn site (by javascript), so everytime they opened their browser they had hundreds of popups load, and two would popup for every one they closed.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
[District Attorneys] learn in District Attorney School that there are
two sure-fire ways to get a lot of favorable publicity:
Raid an "adult book store" and hold a press conference where you
announce you are charging the owner with 850 counts of being a
piece of human sleaze. This also never fails, because you always
get a conviction. A juror at a pornography trial is not about to
state for the record that he finds nothing obscene about a movie
where actors engage in sexual activities with live snakes and a
fire extinguisher. He is going to convict the bookstore owner, and
vote for the death penalty just to make sure nobody gets the wrong
impression.
The Machine stops.
If the malware really did cause the popups that would send someone to jail, couldn't the person/company that wrote the malware go to jail?
Could this be a way to stop people from writing "official" malware (like GAIN)?
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid