Malware Can Download Child Porn To Your Computer

2muchcoffeeman writes "The Associated Press tells the story of Michael Fiola, a former Massachusetts government employee who was arrested in 2007 after child porn was found on his state-issued laptop computer. He was eventually cleared of all charges after some digging by the defense found that the laptop was infected with malware that was 'programmed to visit as many as 40 child porn sites per minute — an inhuman feat. While Fiola and his wife were out to dinner one night, someone logged on to the computer and porn flowed in for an hour and a half. Prosecutors performed another test and confirmed the defense findings. The charge was dropped — 11 months after it was filed.' The article also discusses the technical aspects of how it could happen and about similar cases in the United Kingdom in 2003."

Comments

Re:A new name for this?

[TheRaven64]

I seem to recall reading that the FBI ran some honeypot sites that were linked to indicating that they contained child porn, but didn't. For this kind of malware you'd want to make sure it hit a few of them, downloaded some real child porn, and then deleted itself. Do it to a Senator, for example, and it wouldn't matter if they were cleared within a few days; the scandal would be enough to ruin their political career for life.

Re:new?

[hairyfeet]

I'm glad to see finally someone in power having some common sense. As a PC repairman for way too many years i don't know how many times i have had customers reluctant to come in because they got a "nasty" bug, and after assuring them that I keep everything confidential have them bring it in with something like a bug I call a "topsite hitter".

If you haven't seen one of these it is a really nasty piece of work that'll spew connections to just about every sleazy topsite on the net, my guess it is is for some kind of click fraud. But the sites that'll come up have horse and dog, rape, scat, and yes CP images. Now these folks weren't looking for that, hell nobody would want a bug like that as it slows a network to a crawl spewing connections. It is always either some guy or some teenager who got on his families PC that was looking for plain porn like "lesbian Cheerleaders" and didn't know one should NEVER use IE, much less unpatched IE, and got driveby downloaded.

So I can vouch from years of cleaning bugged PCs that crap like this happens all the time. I have seen bugs that opened backdoors, dumped who knows what into the system files in encrypted folders, spewed connections to every sleazehole on the net, you name it I've probably seen a bug that has done it. I'm glad to see that prosecutors may actually be developing a brain, too bad it took them nearly a year to let this guy off. Surely one look at the log could have told you it was an automated connection. And from talking to a buddy in the state crime lab he says the real CP guys are pretty easy to spot, as they keep tons of the crap lying around on DVDs, flash drives, etc, so a basic search warrant could have shown whether he was a CP perv or not.