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The Virus Did It 373

Posted by michael from the dangers-of-running-insecure-operating-systems dept.
scubacuda writes "The Inquirer and Get Reading report that a UK man accused of having pornographic pictures of kids on his computer was acquitted after a court heard that his machine was infected with a Trojan on his PC which probably auto-downloaded the images. (In light of moves like Operation Ore, we'll probably hear more defenses like this.)"
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The Virus Did It More

The Virus Did It

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  • Insanity (Score:5, Funny)

    by dledeaux ( 174743 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @08:59AM (#5788696) Homepage Journal
    Human: I plead insanity! I wasn't aware of my actions at the time that I was doing them. I can't be held responsible.

    Computer: I plead trojan. I wasn't aware of my actions at the time that I was doing them. I can't be held responsible.

    • Re:Insanity (Score:5, Informative)

      by Dogun ( 7502 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:23AM (#5788869) Homepage
      Forgive the sound of the dying giraffe, but I have to say that the insanity defense is no joke. NGRI is something under constant attack by people who don't really understand it.

      Consider this: you are driving your car. you hit a baby, baby dies. You weren't driving particularly recklessly, under the speedlimit, visibility was just low. It's sad and it happens.
      Consider this: you are drunk, driving your car. And by drunk, I mean you are impaired. You aren't driving particularly recklessly, but the same thing as above happens.

      Now, this doesn't apply to NGRI directly, but consider this: the circumstances around a crime impact the meaning of it. Both of those situations flat out suck, but the argument is that you were being especially irresponsible in the second case, but not in the first.

      Let's say you are sane and you kill a guy named Sam. (Sorry, Sam.) He kicked your dog, and now you're going to pump his head full of lead and do some of that stuff out of the first scene of "Way of the Gun".

      Now, consider case two: you are insane, and you believe that Jodie Foster is in love with you and tells you to do things, and you feel complied to do so. You are not even aware of your delusion, and the fact that you are having the delusion implies that a great deal of your judgement is impaired. In fact, you could say that you didn't know what you were doing - you can still remember doing them, but you thought you were killing the martian high leader of the invasion force or something. In this case, are you responsible for killing a man, or are you responsible for falling for a delusion, which to you seemed very, very real.

      I argue that in this case, you are not guilty of the crime you are charged with because you frankly were not in control of your reality.

      And ultimately, if you look up statistics on the defense, you'll find that it is hardly ever used, does not work when it should, and that the mean time spent incarcerated in mental hostpitals by NGRI people is higher than the mean time spent in prison for the same crime.

      There is actually a famous case where a guy shot somebody very important under the compulsion of one of his delusionary characters and was found not guilty by reason of insanity, who is now sitting, treated, recovered, in a mental hospital, getting clean review after clean review and not being released by the board that controlls his release.

      Whine as much as you want about the implications of this trojan defense, but don't equate it or compare it to the not guilty be reason of insanity defense. They are quite different.

      Also, note that it *IS* possible that a trojan's job would be to search for child pornography on Kazaa or something. Ultimately it'll probably just pull up legit porn, but somebody COULD design such a program.

      Now, granted that, the prosecution should have made a serious attempt to disprove the defendants claims. I suspect they did otherwise.

      • One more thing (Score:5, Informative)

        by Dogun ( 7502 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:29AM (#5788906) Homepage
        Once again, sorry for bleating like a dying, clubbed baby seal, but I felt that I should add that although I don't have any links that I can think of right now DIRECTLY on the subject, I would like to direct you to a series of essays on kuro5hin.org, written by a man living with schizoaffective disorder. Although it probably won't change your viewpoints, perhaps upon reading about some of this guy's experiences, you'll have a building block to construct a more enlightened philosophy of justice and of mental disorder.
      • That's not very relevant, because legal punishments have two purposes only: deterrance and keeping dangerous people off the streets, so that they cannot harm others, insane or not (you'd have to be insane to be a serial killer anyway). People who are acquitted on capital crimes on the basis of alleged insanity or temporary insanity should NEVER be released until it can be thoroughly proven that they have regained mental balance and are no longer a threat to the public. Whether they are a continued threat
        • there is quite a difference between insanity and being a (psycho|socio)path.
          The point of justice is not actually what you think it is, either. It's rehabilitation.
          Someone who is insane probably does not have an accurate view of reality - like in the example I listed earlier. Someone who goes around murdering people out of malice, knowing full well what he is doing is not necessarily insane, and certainly not by virtue of his actions by our legal definitons.

          And that point about releasing people who are fo
          • "The point of justice is not actually what you think it is, either. It's rehabilitation."

            What country to you live in, hippie!! THis heres america. Whe thro em into overcrowed prisons with basic cable where the classrooms have been turned into bunkrooms, becasue after 10 years of that, theyre bound to come out and not ever want to commit any heinous crimes like pot smoking ever again. /sarcasm

        • Re:Insanity (Score:2, Interesting)

          by nolife ( 233813 )
          I agree to a certain extent but..

          What if you wake up in the middle of the night and find someone in your house hurting a family member. You approach the situation and the person starts running away. I do not know exactly what I would do but there is a chance that the average person would be inclined to chase him down and cause great harm with any weapon they could find. Does that mean you'd be a potential harm to society and should be locked up? You were never a treat to the general public, only someo
      • Here is another maybe potentially simpler analogy.

        Lets say you have a wireless phone. Very common here in Europe. One day somebody comes by and notices that they have cracked your digital code. The digital codes are not that hard to crack. At that point the person makes a phone call and it turns out to be a murderer or terrorist (popular term these days). The question is if you are liable? Answer not likely since this was done without you knowing what is going on. At the worst you can be held as an
        • This is a very good example of a plausible situation where you get fux0red. In this case, I doubt that you would have a great deal of luck determining if your cell phone had been cloned, and showing that to the court - though the burden of proof should be on the prosecution to show that your cell phone had not been cloned.

          However, I don't think that a cell phone call is sufficient evidence to build a case around you without some other stuff - and yes, it is very conceivable that a number of circumstantial

      • Re:Insanity (Score:2, Insightful)

        by DickBreath ( 207180 )
        Whether someone is insane, is experiencing delusions or not, this should not mean that the person does not need to be taken off the streets.

        I don't care what is the reason sopmeone pumps the guy's head full of lead. Insane or sane. They need to be taken off the streets for everyone else's protection. No nonsense about "you were insane, so you should go free".

        But then, what about "I was insane, it was temporary. Now at trial, I am sane. Because I was not responsible, I must not be punished."? Hey

        • RTFP (Score:2)

          by Dogun ( 7502 )
          You didn't read the full post.

          You don't go free after being declared NGRI. It's quite different than being declared not guilty. You go to a mental hospital until such time as some guy on some board decides that the hospital is correct and that you are sane. Until then, and that can be a long time after you've regained your sanity, you are in a mental hospital.

      • Thinking this through... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by NetSettler ( 460623 ) <kent-slashdot@nhplace.com> on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @10:49AM (#5789483) Homepage Journal
        Consider this: you are drunk, driving your car. And by drunk, I mean you are impaired. You aren't driving particularly recklessly, but the same thing as above happens.

        And drinking is the interesting analogy because you generally begin sober and aware that drinking will lead to a lack of accountability. In many jurisdictions, this knowledge means you are still liable because the ultimate consequences are forseeable.

        So now, what if I offered a site that wanted to distribute a banned kind of material (kiddie porn, secure encryption technology, that kind of thing) and it was known that anyone connecting could not legally ask for what they surely wanted. Isn't the obvious solution for me to make a virus that will "helpfully" download it for you? You'd just pay for "time at my site" browsing my fine HTML pages, not for the content. But, magically, the content would just get thrust upon you. Escort services use this dodge. Customer pays for time, not service. But customers get service, typically, or they don't come back. Still, legally, the transaction may be quite distinct from prostitution (so I'm told).

        Then again, the escort service model obliges me to come to the issue of "victimless crime". Driving drunk and injuring someone has a victim, and we want to fix the legal system to minimize such cases. Escort services have no obvious victim, IMO, and so I'd argue the other way--that perhaps the simpler solution is just to legalize prostitution.

        Child porn is caught in between these two scenarios, I think, with some parts of it falling into one scenario and some into the other. Certainly, if the pics are of real children, then that's bad. But it's within range of technology to make the entire industry based on fabricated images. Then who would be the victim? If no child was abused in the taking of the pictures, for all we know, the people in possession of them are sublimating urges they might otherwise carry out. Is taking the photos away going to cause them to not have the urge? Or just cause them to be out on the street seeking real children? We're so quick to make assumptions in this area, I just don't know why we don't just make a death penalty for anyone even suspected of child abuse or kiddie porn and be done with it mercifully, because nothing the person can do for the rest of their life after they're found in possession of something like this will ever be normal.

        When I see a child being abused, it's not erotic to me. That it is to someone shouldn't make it a crime for me to see it--maybe I and all of us need to see that picture to understand someone's outrage about a crime. How do we know when someone is seeing something for a "legitimate" reason or not? There may be pictures of murders that arouse people, but we distinguish between "snuff films" (which are illegal because of their filming technique, not their content) and other films about murder, because murder is a fact of life we need to understand. I am alarmed at the concept that the mere possession of certain kinds of topic material, in and of itself, a crime. Who will study this crime if no one may possess its materials? Will images of murder, of feces, or other things that turn others on but not me one day also be illegal to possess? Where does it stop?

        Sure--people are legitimately angry at people who harm children, and they want someone to punish. They can't catch the guy who makes it, so they find someone else to lash out at. (The drug war is the same way. Sometimes drugs cause problems, so we make all uses of drugs illegal whether they hurt anyone or not, just so there's always someone handy to punish when we're mad.) I just hope that in our rush to make it possible to punish people who too easily elude our present systems, we don't take away rights which are not causally related to any kind of harm. And I have to say, the idea of criminalizing the viewing a picture, any picture, in privacy, whether it's a field of daisies or a torture chamber somewhere, is

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:00AM (#5788697)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Hmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DarkBlack ( 5773 ) <darkblack&miscreation,net> on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:00AM (#5788701) Homepage
    I guess you should have invested in some virus protection software. Could have saved a lot of money.

  • What's the Point... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Valthonis ( 607085 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:02AM (#5788710) Homepage
    ...of making a virus that downloads child pr0n onto a remote computer? I thought virii were created to wreak havoc, not frame random computer users... or am I wrong? And furthermore, if a jury can believe this defense, what's to keep all the imminent RIAA and MPAA suits from being defused by the same argument? FIRST POST! WOO!!

    • Re:What's the Point... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by kinnell ( 607819 )
      Well, for the sake of argument, if someone had a grudge against the guy and wanted to cause him hell without being found out, they would have done an outstanding job.

    • Re:What's the Point... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ergo98 ( 9391 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:13AM (#5788800) Homepage Journal
      The point of trojans generally is that they let the evil hacker commit crimes in a less trackable way: Whether it's DOSing Yahoo, defacing websites, or cracking into banks. It seems logical to extrapolate that that they could use it to download and archive their child pornography as well, leaving all tracks pointing to the poor trojaned PC owner, while the hacker disappears into the night. While it's obvious that defenses like this mean that every child porn fanatic is going to stick a trojan on their PC to have a legal out, realistically it means that law enforcement should consider options when they move in on a suspect, such as monitoring all incoming and outgoing traffic for control commands, etc, or replacing the user's PC with a honeypot.

    • Re:What's the Point... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mindaktiviti ( 630001 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:18AM (#5788837)
      "...of making a virus that downloads child pr0n onto a remote computer? I thought virii were created to wreak havoc, not frame random computer users... or am I wrong? And furthermore, if a jury can believe this defense, what's to keep all the imminent RIAA and MPAA suits from being defused by the same argument? FIRST POST! WOO!! "

      Didn't wreak havoc? The guy lost his 500 pounds a day job, didn't work for two years, got his named associated with child pornography...this trojan already made him lose out on two years of his own life. I'd say that constitutes as wreaking havoc.
    • Theoretically, a tech-savvy kiddie porn junkie could use a trojan to store the material on other people's computers, and browse it from there. Probable? Hardly. Possible? I'd think so...

      • Re:What's the Point... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by N1XIM ( 159082 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @10:02AM (#5789116)
        Not only is it possible.......IT HAPPENS! I have worked on a friends machine where some guy from the ISP (RoadRunner) was using port 53 (yes, the nameserver) to force him to log onto the ISP's network--thus allowing the intrepid sikko to download kiddie porn through this guy's machine via a trojan horse + buffer overflow (use the buffer overflow to place the trojan) attack. This is on WinXP, WinME, and Win98. I know this because I did the packet trace & analysis of what happened when he booted the machine. When he switched to my local nameserver running on my laptop, mind you, he got spared.
        So, not only is it possible, it is being done.
        I now run UNIX as much as possible--especially since one of my idiot roommates just switched us to RoadRunner (even after I told her about this happening......). This guy whose machine I worked on was behind a firewall, and he still got hacked. UNIX it is for me, thank you.
    • I could see a lot of people interested in a very high capacity distributed filesystem which could make use of hundreds of trojan'd PCs out on the internet to store information which you didn't want found on your own computer.

      Make it highly redundant, self healing, replicating data as the "servers" go offline to make sure the information remains available. Hell, I could use something like that here at work.

    • The netnanny alert sets off simulatenously on all employees in the company. That is mayhem and destruction way beyond the scale of an average virus. It is havoc squared ;-)

  • Sounded fishy at first... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hee Hee Hee ( 310695 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:02AM (#5788711)
    This sounded fishy at first, until I saw
    "The specialist found the day before the images were downloaded the program was implemented, so there's a direct correlation between them,"
    in the second article cited. Kinda makes you want to update your virus detection/bot detection/firewall/etc, doesn't it?
    • Still sounds fishy to me. I believe there are "dialers" that dial up a private connection to someone's server, after you download and run it. Could easily be a virus in one of those.

      Though I certainly would not put it past a virus maker to attempt a little social sabotage. And it doesn't take much to get a trojan on your PC. A year or two ago I was repairing my mom's Windows machine, and discovered a trojan that had installed itself because she had sharing turned on (not even an open drive). The trojan its
    • Kinda makes you want to update your virus detection/bot detection/firewall/etc, doesn't it?

      Kinda makes you want to keep a compromised Windows box lying around, doesn't it?

      Your honor, this Windows box used to be exposed to the net. It must have been compromised by some evil anonymous remote hacker prior to my acquisition of a firewall. That's where all these evil mp3's came from.

      What's that? Yes, I did run Windows Update. But that must have occured after the box was root compromised.

      (I can
    • Kinda makes you want to update your virus detection/bot detection/firewall/etc, doesn't it?

      That may not help much. A couple years back, I inadvertently started a minor "research project" at a place I was working by checking out a link to a bit of cute satire sent to me by a friend. I chuckled at it a bit, and then forgot about it. For about one day. When I came in the next morning, the NT workstation that I'd used was showing a rather pornographic picture.

      I quickly verified that the site was indeed

  • I must have lots of viruses.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by hoggoth ( 414195 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:02AM (#5788712) Journal
    They've been downloading MP3s, porn, movies, all kinds of stuff I am not aware of!

  • Trojans (Score:4, Funny)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:02AM (#5788713) Homepage
    Now this is why you should always use protection? Don't know what you will catch

    Rus

  • Won't Work (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Unoriginal Nick ( 620805 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:03AM (#5788715)
    In light of moves like Operation Ore, we'll probably hear more defenses like this.

    I doubt this type of defense will help people who used their credit card to sign up for child porn sites.

    • Re:Won't Work (Score:3, Interesting)

      by NiteHaqr ( 29663 )
      But maybe in the future it would.

      With all the programs that offer to manage your financial account details, all it would need is an app that automatically fills in those credit card numbers for you when you go to buy something.

      Then all you need is a Virus that can get at that data and bingo - a Virus that can sign you up to all sorts of things, and all in your name.

      Now imagine if that Virus ran, signed you for an annual subscription to a porn site (at a time you were logged in and browsing) before deleti

      • Re:Won't Work (Score:3, Interesting)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 )
        Basically if its on the machine, assume that someone else can get at it.

        Yeah, or if it passes through the machine in unencrypted form, even. This is why passwords and credit card numbers (and similar) suck, and why we need biometric identification instead. Credit card numbers are the worst, because you regularly show them to people at stores and whatnot.

    • No.. no... the virus not only downloaded the porn, but also used his credit card information to sign up for the site, confirmed his subscription via email, and initiated correspondance with Michael Jackson...

      • Re:Won't Work (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Skuto ( 171945 )
        >No.. no... the virus not only downloaded the
        >porn, but also used his credit card information
        >to sign up for the site, confirmed his
        >subscription via email,

        If it got his credit card details, registering to a porn site would be no problem. You don't even need his email.

        This would be a viable defense IMHO.

        --
        GCP

  • Great defense. (Score:4, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:04AM (#5788727) Homepage Journal

    Himmler: My orders were not from Hitler but from a virus.
    Tim McVeigh: A virus filled that truck with diesel and fertilizer.
    Magic Johnson: I didn't get AIDS from a woman but from a virus.

    well.. ok, you can scratch the last one.

  • UK Law... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MrBandersnatch ( 544818 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:04AM (#5788729)
    In the run up to the case, according to the Reading Evening Post, Mr Schofield suffered vigilante attacks and had to first hide in his home then move away to avoid continued attacks

    Yet another example of why the decision to allow defendants in criminal trials to be named was a bad decision *sigh*.

    As to the story - sounds strange that a trojan would do that unless someone was using his machine as a proxy and in that case why would the images be cached on his system?

    • Oh but you misunderstand! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      See, its not a problem that the odd inncent person has his life ruined by association with crimes that they did not commit, because we're dealing with kiddie porn! Sure, a few people will have their lives ruined, but it's kiddie porn!

      I personally think that we should skip the trials altogether. Sure, some innocent people will end up in the nonce wing for life, but it's kiddie porn!

      Won't somebody please think of the children!

      O.K, I'll stop now. I don't even know if I'm being sarcastic any more...
    • As to the story - sounds strange that a trojan would do that unless someone was using his machine as a proxy and in that case why would the images be cached on his system?

      The story doesn't seem entirely unlikely though.
      A company I know had a server compromised some time ago and had a rootkit installed. They were then used as a warez ftp server.
      Why would the cracker do that?
      Maybe he was just after some disk space and a fat pipe?
      But maybe, just maybe it was warez the cracker absolutely positively didn'

  • he lived near me (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:04AM (#5788735)
    This bloke lived near me, he was hounded out of his home by ignorant fuckwits who presume that becuase somebody lives with their mother and father (after the age of 18) and is being done for paedophile images, the must be guilty.

    It's a bit of a wake up call to the moronic masses that people can be innocent as well as guilty!

  • I see (Score:2, Funny)

    by Joe the Lesser ( 533425 )
    So that's how those pictures of mating llamas got on my hard drive!

    Why haven't I deleted them?...

    *shifts eyes, and flees*
  • It's not clear from the articles....Is this guy claiming that the virus automatically downloaded the images themselves or that the virus opened up a back door for someone else to use his PC as a storage facility for their images?

  • the largest security hole is the client machine (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Submarine ( 12319 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:06AM (#5788759) Homepage

    The more it goes, the more I think that the main issue of online security is not the protocols (SSL, SET...) but the security of the endpoints, and particularly of the clients.

    I would not be surprised if we found a virus that searches through the local (and even LAN-accessible) documents for interesting keywords or types of information, then somehow manages to send this information back to some spying agency. In fact, I think this has probably already been done.

    Imagine the potential:
    • economic espionage
    • blackmail (emails showing that he has a mistress / has taken illegal bribes...)

    Of course, most corporate networks are firewalled. Still, lots of binary data is exchanged. You just have to hide yours in the flux... Do you really think this would be noticed in the middle of a virus attack?. Traffic analysis would be thwarted by the viral attack sending information in many directions, with no obvious destination. Onion peel routing and distribution through Usenet or WWW bulletin boards could do the rest - untracable information.

  • When the crime is as insane as "possession of a picture" (a digital one, no less), the defenses to the crime will sound somewhat nutty as well. It's to be expected. The only solution is to eradicate due process entirely and just execute the acccused immediately. Considering we're talking about kiddie porn here, i'm sure a vast majority of people wouldn't mind doing so at all.

  • Acquitted - but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chocaholic ( 635430 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:07AM (#5788764)
    The problem this guy is going to face is that, despite his conviction, the prevailing mood in the UK is such that he will still find himself stigmatised for a very long time.

    As he found out from the vigilante attacks before his trial, the maxim "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't seem to apply for some people any more - the witch hunts led by certain newspapers mean that any slight suggestion of paedophilia turns the accused into an immediate fugitive.

    Therefore, though it's very kind of the Crown Prosecution Service to accept this explanation at trial, why did they wait before it was up before a judge with all the attendant publicity before letting him off the hook?

    In the minds of some people as well, there's going to be an attitude of "that's right, blame it on the computer - he would say that, wouldn't he?". Technology-based defences simply don't hold water for a lot of non-technical people - which with the increasing number of technological offences being put to juries is quite a worry.

    So, this guy will still be stigmatised as a paedophile, all for the price of some virus checking software...
    • As he found out from the vigilante attacks before his trial, the maxim "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't seem to apply for some people any more

      That maxim has never applied to me, as I have never been in a jury. As an individual, I have every right to make a judgement of guilt on my own. Of course, its probably not that wise of me to make such a judgement without all the pertinent facts (its called prejudism), but we're all free to make that judgement.

      Case in point: If someone walks up to me an

  • Dubious....... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Angleworm ( 174702 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:08AM (#5788765) Homepage
    Very dubious indeed. I find it very hard to believe that he did not notice several image files appearing on his drive. Also such paedophiles are monitored very carefully, and not without reason.

    This may have been a case where the jury and judge knew very little about the natures of trojan and computer.

    • Re:Dubious....... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Obasan ( 28761 )
      Do you live on the same planet? My computer has tens of thousands of "image" files on it - most of them are jpeg, bitmaps, pcx etc. etc. etc. associated with installed software or in various caches from web browsing. Most computers are like this. Do a search on any windows computer for common image formats and you'll get back hundreds if not thousands of results. Do you know what every single one of those images are? Didn't think so.

      If these things were saved to his desktop or something, thats one thi

    • Re:Dubious....... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by wazzzup ( 172351 ) <astromacNO@SPAMfastmail.fm> on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:38AM (#5788970)
      I find it entirely feasible that a person would not notice a large amount of files added to their computer. Not all people know their computer well enough to notice image files being added onto their hard drive - particularly if added to a system directory or somewhere a casual user doesn't normally peruse. Take OS X for example - I could load tons of files into the /var directory. To see the contents of /var on a normally configured OS X machine you have to go to the terminal or specifically configure the file browser (Finder) to make those type of directories visible. On my Windows 2000 machine at work I cannot browse the WINNT directory unless I click on Show Files (after reading the "This isn't the directory you're looking for. Move along now." warning). I'm 99.99% sure that I could add a gig of porn to my parents hard drive and they would never be the wiser.

      Because those of us at Slashdot are more technically adept and let's face it - our computers are a major part of our day-to-day life - we assume incorrectly that everyday people are more capable with their computers and see them more than just a box that balances their checkbook.
    • I probably have about 20 or 30 files sitting on my desktop that I havn't filed away, and a lot of that changes frequently. I doubt I would even notice one or two more, although I eventualy might see what they were in order to 'file' them. (and, by that I mean dumping into a big folder along with everything else I've cleaned off my desktop in the past few years)

      Beyond that, my computer has hundreds of thousands of files on it, in total. I don't even know how many. I would never notice additions... unle

  • Negligence Or Delusion (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:08AM (#5788771) Homepage Journal

    This case sounds interesting for a couple of reasons. The defendent's entire case is out the window, of course, if the prosecution shows that the virus was not responsible for downloading kiddie pr0n. Assume such a virus existed for the sake of argument.

    First, there is negligence for allowing one's computer to become infected. A related precedent would be the owner of a condemned house allowing it to become a crack house. IANAL, but in a lot of ways it seems the cases are similar. One could claim that the software manufacturer (MS) was responsible for faulty software, or that the virus writer was responsible for letting loose his creation. In the same way, the crackhouse owner could claim that the lock manufacturer did a poor job, or that the addicts breaking into his house were at fault.

    Second, if computers become more like personal extensions of ourselves, indispensible, parts of our consciousness in some far-fetched way, then the defendent might take the insanity route. That is, "God told me to take 7 wives and this girl is one of them." However, computers are subject to more detailed forensics that people's brains, so claiming an insane computer might not withstand much scrutiny in court.

    • Re:Negligence Or Delusion (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Jerf ( 17166 )
      First, there is negligence for allowing one's computer to become infected.

      Someday, we may be able to claim this. But I'm really uncomfortable claiming it today.

      A couple of computers got hacked. One of them was with a vulnerability that I hadn't even heard of yet in samba; I got my Debian announcement later that day.

      Right now, even the most updated computer is just too full of vulnerabilities to make a valid case that it should be possible to maintain a computer that has no vulnerabilities at all. That

      • the most updated computer is just too full of vulnerabilities

        Well, that probably says a lot about the overall state of computer security.

        But if you've kept your system updated with the latest patches, then most people would think that you've exercised due diligence.

    • First, there is negligence for allowing one's computer to become infected. A related precedent would be the owner of a condemned house allowing it to become a crack house. IANAL, but in a lot of ways it seems the cases are similar. One could claim that the software manufacturer (MS) was responsible for faulty software, or that the virus writer was responsible for letting loose his creation. In the same way, the crackhouse owner could claim that the lock manufacturer did a poor job, or that the addicts break

      • Unlike a crackhouse, which is an eyesore and reduces quality of life for the people around it...

        A lot of people, myself included, would be inclined to believe that a insecured, vulnerable and 0wn3d computer on a high BW connection represents an inconvience and reduction in quality of life to the net community.

        Getting a DDOS attack from compromised zombie machines is as bad as getting woke up in the middle of the night by gunshots coming from the crackhouse down the block.

  • err.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by idfrsr ( 560314 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:08AM (#5788774)
    I am sorry Mr. President... my computer was infected with a virus and this trojan submitted comupter code to terrorist supporting open source projects. Particularily, OpenBSD [slashdot.org]...

  • Windows (Score:3, Funny)

    by Mattygfunk1 ( 596840 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:09AM (#5788780)
    That's the reason I keep a windows box around. If anyone comes knocking then it was a hacker that downloaded those Britney Spears tracks.

    --
    cheap website hosting [cheap-web-...ing.com.au]

    • That's the reason I keep a windows box around. If anyone comes knocking then it was a hacker that downloaded those Britney Spears tracks.

      Then again, if you download Britney Spears MP3s you don't need to go to jail, you need to go to an institution for the mentally & audibly handicapped instead...

    • That's the reason I keep a windows box around. If anyone comes knocking then it was a hacker that downloaded those Britney Spears tracks.

      "You're under arrest!"
      "No Officer, I swear that some hacker took over my computer and downloaded those Britney Spears songs. Honest!"
      "Sorry son, but no hacker is that stupid. Come along..."

    • That's the reason I keep a windows box around. If anyone comes knocking then it was a hacker that downloaded those Britney Spears tracks.

      You need to keep a compromised Windows box around. It needs to look like it also runs an open FTP server that someone else uses to stash their warez and mp3z.

      Hey Judge! It must have been some hacker on my Windoze box. It used to be directly exposed to the net, but sometime in the past, I acquired a new firewall. So the evil intruder must have compromised my Win
      • "You need to keep a compromised Windows box around. "
        er.. excuse me, is there an uncompromised Windows box? The Windows auto-update and GoToMyPC can puch thru the built-in firewall!

        It is safe only when you switch off your Windows computer.

  • Personal Responsibility Today (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TrollBridge ( 550878 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:09AM (#5788782) Homepage Journal
    OK first of all I'm not going to judge whether or not this guy's defense is valid. I guess they'll have to take a look at the supposed 'virus' to determine if that was in fact the cause of the porn downloads.

    With that out of the way, I find it amazing the lengths people will go to to blame anybody or anything for their actions but themselves. "I didn't download pictures of naked children, the computer did it!" or "I didn't willingly throw myself upon a flaming mattress, that show on MTV made me do it! or "I didn't want to get pregnant, it was HIS fault!"

    I apologize for this somewhat offtopic rant, but it's this kind of lack of personal responsibility that's eroding our society.

  • Uh, you might want to reconsider believing the story attributed to the Register. The domain name for the Register story is an IP address.

  • Worrying precedent (Score:2, Insightful)

    by m_dob ( 639585 )
    I read this story about a week ago. It worried me a lot at the time for the precedent it sets. From the story, either someone was out to incriminate this guy by planting child porn on his computer or this guy really did download it and he is up against some really pathetic prosecutors. We read that he has been attacked in his neighbourhood, and that he is an all round family man. Fine. But that in itself doesn't make the story more credible... Either way, the guy responsible has got away free. Isn't that

  • Bye bye Symantec... (Score:5, Funny)

    by dreadpiratemark ( 450962 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:15AM (#5788813)
    I gotta keep this short 'cause I have to go uninstall Symantec Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition to make sure that my company lawyers have a good defense for some of our employees.... Hell, I might just turn off our firewall and load MS Backoffice for an OS as long as we're looking to give more people/programs easy access.

  • Not unheard of (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DavidLeblond ( 267211 ) <me&davidleblond,com> on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:21AM (#5788859) Homepage
    My brother called me one day to say that his new computer had run out of disk space and he didn't know why. I connected to his computer via Remote Desktop and browsed his folder and when I got to his My Music directory it was full of 7 gigs of movie files, none of which he had seen before. I deleted them and suggested he get a firewall program.

    Sure enough, as soon as he got his firewall up he got a slew of alerts about people trying to connect to his computer. I make sure I keep my firewall up at all times now.
    • Exactly. If I were you, or your brother (but since he has limited computer knowledge), I would get a virus scanner and locate the backdoor or two he has on his system. Nobody puts movies on your computer unless they want to serve them to a lot of people.

      Also, your brother needs a larger hard drive, 100+ gigs are cheap now!

      Basically, the majority of the things "insert anyone but my name here" downloads, from xbox games to movies or new music albums is obtained the quickest from places like xdcc channels,
    • He doesn't need a firewall, just turn off that remote desktop service that people were using to put files on his computer. That and disable file and print sharing, or at least unbind it from the TCP/IP adapter. Assuming he isn't running a webserver or anything like that (which it sounds like he isn't intentionally), that will knock out 99% of all the sources of attack on his computer.

      Firewalls are not the end-all be-all of security, and in many cases promote poor security habits. Turn off the stuff you don
    • I connected to his computer via Remote Desktop and browsed his folder

      Hmmm....I think we may found the problem right there. Have you told your brother that it was you yet? ;)

    • Once I made several mistakes at the same time.
      1 Applied an access list to a wrong interface on a router
      2 Behind this router I put a Win2k computer, which had been configured for a private network. Computer name, admin account and password for this account was the same word.
      One day I found that this computer had a remote control software and FTP server installed on it. I wouldn't be surprised to find some kiddie porn few days later, so I think that the story makes sense.
  • this is the first virus that I want....

    I'll be damned if Norton will "Protect" me from the hoors of pr0n
  • The articles don't mention why the authorities looked on his PC for kiddie porn. What tipped them off?

    I suspect there's much more to this case than the articles mention.
  • I was unaware the UK had reinstated the Stupidty defense.

    M@
  • Surfing the web i've ended up with shortcuts to porn sites in my favourites and in my history - along with that, pictures in my internet cache. (and then when I go to type in a URL in Start->Run, fucking auto-complete puts in one of the addresses - that's always fun when you're at work, VNCing into your machine, and all your coworkers see something like www.hotpeanutbutterclits.com or something 0_0)

    I've also seen people's pc's hacked and used to serve up free porn and warez.

    This particular case may be

  • Let's take this one step further (Score:5, Funny)

    by Raul654 ( 453029 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:37AM (#5788954) Homepage
    Yes officer, the lock on my front door has been broken for a few weeks now. That body is in the basement because some bastard probably dropped it off there while I was at work
  • I've seen a lot of jokes about Kaaza and other P2P networks doing this automatically, modded as funny. However, I think there's more to it than that. At least with eDonkey2000, I see files appear in my download section that aren't mine. I'm not all that clear on how it works but I think it's part of the caching mechanism to help your "peers" with their downloads as they do for you.

    Anyway, with P2P getting more sophisticated, efficient and private, I can easily see this happening a lot. Of course, I d

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • It's possible. I've seen it! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:39AM (#5788973)
    2001-12-25 02:34:02 Porn trojan virus? (articles,security) (rejected)

    I've seen and disinfected a laptop of a friend who was infected with a virus that downloaded porn pages in the background whenever he connected to the internet. I guess it was to collect link credits. His history and cache would fill up with porn crap and he claimed to not be visiting the sites. At first I didn't believe him (obviously) and was surprised when I saw the behavior for myself. Beware!

  • My experience… (Score:5, Interesting)

    by (H)elix1 ( 231155 ) <slashdot.helix@nOSPaM.gmail.com> on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:42AM (#5788991) Homepage Journal
    I see a lot of comments about - wink, wink - sure it was the virus, or dumb ass for executing a Trojan.

    My first lesson with an improperly configured Linux box outside the firewall was when my ISP called asking about some insane bandwidth use. What? I checked the box and it seemed fine. Found out the traffic was on FTP, which I was not using. Sure enough, tons of porn and other files were getting uploaded and downloaded... all the files in a hidden directory. The box was owned, and I ended up rebuilding from scratch, this time leaving services off I did not actually use and patching some of the services I did. Than I discovered ssh and a few other key insights that were new to me.

    I cannot believe I am the only one this kind of thing happened to...

    • Re:My experience… (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:58AM (#5789093) Homepage Journal
      Yeah well you can't prosecute someone for (just) being an idiot.

      Most new Linux folks (myself included) go through the "I don't see why I can't run as root; I know what I'm doing" phase of sysadminning. They also go through the "I'll give everyone I know accounts on my system" phase of sysadminning. Once they get owned a couple of times, most of them learn and don't do that anymore.

  • No Judge... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Spleen ( 9387 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @09:56AM (#5789079)
    I didn't notice the folder named "Child Porn" and all the neatly arranged subfolders inside of "My Documents".

  • It's not like this hasn't happened before (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A couple of months ago CSO magazine ran an article about [csoonline.com] a similar problem, except it was coupled with the threat of blackmail.
    Could it possible that this (or something similar) can get an innocent victim arrested? In a less technologically literate or a far more fundamentallist culture, the "virus did it" defense probably won't work . . .
  • I hope the general public starts to understand cases like this and make the connection to the ISP who wish to own their customers networks and computers, and governments that wish to have back doors into all network equipment and computers. There are so many risks associated current security holes, why do we want to add them on purpose.

    In this case a crime was committed. Whether the crime was committed by the accused or some unknown third party is irrelevant. All that is relevant is known security hole

  • Get around RIAA (Score:2, Insightful)

    by JoeCotellese ( 126966 )
    I was discussing this very notion with a co-worker not to long ago as a way to get around the RIAA. If someone writes a virus that connects to P2P networks would you be liable for songs downloaded onto your machine if it was discovered that you were infected?

  • Computers are dogs. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by amcguinn ( 549297 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @11:02AM (#5789619) Journal

    So, the day has come at last. I must say I'm surprised, as I've been expecting it for over 5 years.

    The point is that the law has to decide how much responsibility a person has for what their computer decides to do.

    Up till now, the assumption has been that whatever your computer does, is done at your request, and you are wholly responsible. This despite the fact that that has never been true, and is getting further from the truth every year.

    There is no legal tradition to apply here. The nearest analogy to the relationship between a person and his computer is the relationship between a man and his dog.

    People have kept dogs for thousands -- most likely tens of thousands -- of years, so everyone has a rough idea what the deal is. The general legal view is that you have a duty to keep your dog from causing harm under forseeable circumstances, but there is a distinction between what your dog does and what you do. If your dog attacks a child, you are not guilty of Grievous Bodily Harm, but you might be guilty of keeping a dangerous dog. If your dog craps on the street, that is different than if you crap on the street, but you might still be fined.

    If you are found guilty of not properly controlling a dog, you can be banned from keeping one. If your dog causes harm and is considered not to be controllable, the court can order it to be destroyed.

    (If you deliberately cause your dog to kill someone, that is still murder of course, but your intention is crucial)

    This is the only rational legal framework for crimes committed by a computer without the intention of its owner.

    When will computers that run MS-Windows be ordered to be put down?

  • First off.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Chanc_Gorkon ( 94133 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <nokrog>> on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @11:46AM (#5790077)
    The guy is a sicko. No doubt about that. Second, I have a real problem with the way they seem to be handling kiddie porn prosecution. They are going, it seems, after the users and not the sick bastard who took pictures of the children in the first place, and put them up on the web. If the kiddie porn producers are taken care of, then the user end pretty much gets taken care of by itself. I ain't saying that these sickos should not be watched. If you download them, chances are, you will upload them. So, yeah they should monitor the guy. I never said that what they user does is right either, it's just if the picture does not exist to download, well, you get the idea. He'll just have to go somewhere else for his sick fantasy. Also, there are a ton of porn sites that ride the edge in my opinion. I mean have you ever gotten a e-mail (that was not filtered yet) and the girl in that porn spam looked like she was WAY too young. I have seen this time and time again (SPAMMERS! Got to hate them....).

  • How can they tell? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @12:01PM (#5790208)
    I have to ask this question because I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering. How can someone tell if a particular image is of a child in a pornographic contex? In all honesty the crap that many people label as child porn is just an early picture of young-looking porn star, like Devon or Allisyn Chains. The so-called lolita pictures are typically a 30-year old women in pig tails and a school girl outfit. I know this because like damned near all of you I have seen porn. It's nothing to be ashamed of. We're all adults here. However I will say that I've seen some pretty questionable photos, even in my mind's eye. Some of them I honestly couldn't say if they were or weren't or a minor. That's not to say that they were for certain but that's also not to say that they were of an adult. How would a law-enforcement person prove that the person in the photo really is a minor? Wouldn't they have to find that person and get that person to say on the stand when the photo was taken and how old they were at the time? Anything else would be pure speculation. I know baby-faced and flat-chested seniors in college who could pass as a 14 year-old. Meer appearances are deceiving.

    I imagine many of you have used P2P apps like KaZaA. I'd bet money that almost all of you even downloaded some porn with it. Don't be bashful. There's nothing wrong with it. However I'm sure you too have noticed the overwhelming amount of BS crap files that get turned up in searches. Many of them say "underaged" or "pre-teens" or many other things that indicate a minor child. And many of them are pure junk and are simply pictures ripped from a Girls Gone Wild video. However some times you end up downloading a picture you just can't identify. You really can't tell if those are kids, flat-chested and baby-faced college seniors, or midgets. If you don't delete these files and leave them on your computer, are you now guilty of having child pornography if someone proves that the picture you downloaded 1 year ago and is still in you junk directory?

    Lets say for example that your ex knows you have porn on your computer. Hell she and you used to watch it together. You break up with her and she's pissed. She makes an anonymous call to the police one night when drunk. The next day and overzealous police officer has a warrant from a judge looking for some good PR for the election coming up. They confiscate your computer and arrest you, even though all they have as proof is the anonymous tip. A lab goes through your hard drives and CDs while you're grilled by a cop with bad breath over how you abuse children. You don't want to call for a lawyer because you don't want to seem guilty. You think it's all a big mistake. The lab boys come back with the porn. The cops browse through it. A picture comes up of Devon in her early years. "Does she look like a minor to you, Bob?" "She sure looks like a minor to me, Chuck." They arrest you and charge you with child pornography, even though they have confirmed that the person in the photo is a minor. The PD and DAs office goes public to say how they've arrested a vile child pornographer. Media coverage. Citizen outrage at him. yadda yadda yadda. In the meantime he's arrained. This gives an assistant DA time to go through all the porn on the hard drive. Whoops. It turns out that the photo the cops thought was child porn wasn't. Hell it obviously wasn't. Damn overzealous cops. Nevertheless he goes through all the porn. He even enlists the help of a person in the pornography business who can recognize many of his fellow actors. Finally they come down to a small handful of pictures that no one can identify. Of these 3 could be of a minor. The DA picks the most child-like photo as proof and goes to trial. The prosecution paints the defendant as a vile, horrible child pornographer. A few of his ex-girlfriends step into the lime light to say how he was abusive or was obsessed with kids or some other bullshit like that. The defense lays out the facts of law and that the photo can't

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