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Man Fired When Laptop Malware Downloaded Porn
Geoffrey.landis writes "The Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents fired worker Michael Fiola and initiated procedures to prosecute him for child pornography when they determined that internet temporary files on his laptop computer contained child porn. According to Fiola, 'My boss called me into his office at 9 a.m. The director of the Department of Industrial Accidents, my immediate supervisor, and the personnel director were there. They handed me a letter and said, "You are being fired for a violation of the computer usage policy. You have pornography on your computer. You're fired. Clean out your desk. Let's go."' Fiola said, 'They wouldn't talk to me. They said, "We've been advised by our attorney not to talk to you."' However, prosecutors dropped the case when a state investigation of his computer determined there was insufficient evidence to prove he had downloaded the files. Computer forensic analyst Tami Loehrs, who spent a month dissecting the computer for the defense, explained in a 30-page report that the laptop was running corrupted virus-protection software, and Fiola was hit by spammers and crackers bombarding its memory with images of incest and pre-teen porn not visible to the naked eye. The virus protection and software update functions on the laptop had been disabled, and apparently the laptop was 'crippled' by malware. According to Loehrs, 'When they gave him this laptop, it had belonged to another user, and they changed the user name for him, but forgot to change the SMS user name, so SMS was trying to connect to a user that no longer existed ... It was set up to do all of its security updates via the server, and none of that was happening because he was out in the field.' A malware script on the machine surfed foreign sites at a rate of up to 40 per minute whenever the machine was within range of a wireless site."
I guess I'm not going to rant about allusions of nepotism or "who you know" being the key to getting article submissions in one's own name....
http://tech.slashdot.org/~davidsyes/journal/
(submitted with no karma bonus/ no subscriber bonus)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I hate to tell you this, but I got suspended from Hewlett Packard for running Linux! The corporate approved Red Hat Enterprise installed on the box by an HP admin and not reconfigured by me cycled randomly though screen savers. One of the screen savers simulated a teletype outputting fortune files to the screen... and one of the fortune files was the Zippy the Pinhead one which contained the quote: "I want to kill everyone here with a cute colorful Hydrogen Bomb!!" So of course, one of HP's highly trained security professionals (otherwise known as rent-a-cops) was wondering through the building at 3 am and saw this message come up on the display, and immediately recognized this as the work of a dangerous terrorist! A couple days later they called me into a meeting (without my manager) a told me I was too dangerous to continue working there. Never having seen that particular screen saver, I couldn't explain why it was there, but there reasoning was "It happened on one of the machines in your cubicle, therefore YOU are responsible!" Asshats...
Anyway, they suspended me for a week with pay; I of course used that week to look for a better job with higher pay and closer to home! Meanwhile, my manager was forced to keep paying me while his project fell a week behind.
At least in MA you are not getting taxed with out representation...
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Seriously though...I had a 6 month contract with one of the largest corporations in the world (and there's no way I'm going to risk leaking their name after what I'm going to say) a couple years ago...I was actually handed a laptop that didn't even have my user name set up in it. I was told the admin password, and I could plainly see that the thing had been used for years without a wipe and reinstall. There were 4 separate logins from past developers that had used that thing that hadn't even been deleted. Of course I had the thing reimaged afterward, but to think that 3 other guys didn't...
In order to give you the benefit of the doubt, please feel free to list the departments and agencies that you think are poorly run, and feel free to list the names of those that hire or have been hired improperly.
You lived in Massachusetts for 3 years? It sounds like you were a student that applied for a job within state government. And I bet you were turned down.
"It must be because I'm not a relative of a high official," you might be saying to yourself, "because I'm a high achiever!"
Good luck in DC.
that's rich coming from you, twitter.
Shouldn't the moral of this story be, "Use Windows and risk losing your job."
There may be stories about viruses infecting Linux systems, but I've never had a problem (except with the random attempts from around the world trying to break into my telnet or ftp servers.) But so long as one keeps those locked down to specific IP addresses then the only problem one has to deal with is SPAM being routed through ones machine.