Acquitted Man Says Virus Put Pornography on Computer

One evening late in 2001, Julian Green's 7-year-old daughter came upstairs from the computer room of their home in the resort town of Torquay, in western England, and said, "The home page has changed, and it's something not very nice."

When Mr. Green checked the machine, he found that the family PC seemed almost possessed. The Internet home page had somehow been switched so that the computer displayed a child pornography site when the browser software started up. Even if he turned the machine off, it would turn itself back on and dial the Internet on its own.


Mr. Green called the computer maker and followed instructions to return his PC to a G-rated state. The pornography went away, but the computer still often crashed and kept connecting to the Internet even when "there was no one in the blinking house," he said.<snip>

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/11/technology/11PORN.html?hp

Almost sounds like an Urban Legend.

...particular trojan. It resets your startpage, puts multiple links in your "favorites," puts icons on your desktop, task bars, and menu bars, and sometimes dials into pay-per view websites.

Very nasty trogan. The latest is from Russia and is called "migmaf" or "migration mafia."

But, again, the most common way to get it is to go to one of those site.

It infected her MS Word program. She's 63 years old, so I doubt she was cruising porn sites.

I came across a pop-up ad once where if you didn't read it carefully (and thought you were clicking it closed), you would have been resetting your homepage. Wasn't a porno site, but it still would have been annoying as hell.

can bring up pornographic sites. If you're not careful you could click on the wrong search result and end up at one of them. I work in a job where I must do searches on medical topics and these searches often bring up porn sites because of the body part that might be included in the search terms.

Yesterday I googled in "calenders to download". I was looking for blank calender pages to use in planning my monthly menu and grocery shopping. Boy, what a shock. Pornographic calanders appear to popular. Who knew.

After I booted the family computer and got an eyeful. And he thought he was being clever clearing the history file!

Not of the family computer--his younger sisters didn't need the education! :eyes:

Saw WAY more of Jenna Jamison (sp?) than I wanted to. Once got caught in a porn loop and had to just shut the thing off.

Here I am, a 45 year old mom and there is nothing quite like porn pop-ups and hollaring for your teen-age son to come help you make the porn go away!! "Gee mom, I didn't know you were into porn!" Ha ha.

can you get rid of these things?

No, really if you want no more pop-ups, switch to using mozilla or opera for your browser. Both have built in pop-up blockers and both handle security alot better then IE. Mozilla is even open-source.



www.mozilla.org


www.opera.com


To get rid of crap you might have installed on your system, try ad-aware. There are other things out there, but some of them are actually spy/ad-ware themselves.

Get it from download.com here.


Also, uninstall all of your peer-to-peer filesharing software before running ad-aware. You can replace them with kazaalite which has no ad/spyware.

You can find kazaalite here.



If you're really sick of it all, consider buying a macintosh or make the switch to linux. A great way to check out what linux is like without much hassle is to download and burn a copy of knoppix and then just boot up with it. Give it a try!!!

You can find knoppix here.

information.

As an example, type in www.yaho.com or www.goggle.com


I haven't had any problems since I switched to mozilla a long time ago.

And I didn't activate any executables on a porn site.

is the ready acceptance by free societies of the principle that people can be punished for possessing offensive reading or viewing matter. That's the really scary and dangerous part.

Heck, people should even be allowed to own and read Ann Coulter's books!




http://www.dvorkin.com

Kiddie porn is not protected speech for good reason. Why? Because you CANNOT produce kiddie porn WITHOUT breaking the law and harming an innocent child. I can write and distribute anti-government manifestos without ever opposing the government, I can write pro-cannibis newletters without ever smoking a joint, I can even advocate setting fire to every corporation in the world and distribute my writings without fear of arrest in the U.S. because they are SPEECH, and speech is independent of action. Kiddie porn is NOT speech, it is ACTION captured on film (or its digital equivalent), and that action is illegal in just about every country in the world.

By posessing kiddie porn, or subscribing to websites or magazines that distribute it, you are materially contributing to a criminal enterprise that assaults, kidnaps, mutilates, and sometimes murders children. THAT is why the posession of kiddie porn is illegal, and why it is not "protected expression" like other images.

First, porn, including kiddie porn, can be created via computer manipulation of digital images. So the existence of an image does not mean that the act depicted actually took place.

Second, the argument is equivalent to saying that possessing a photograph of a murder should make the possessor guilty of murder or of being an accomplice to murder. Those who commit the actual act are the ones who should be pursued and prosecuted, not those who possess images of the act.



http://www.dvorkin.com

but the law takes some strange turns. There have been a fair amount of abuses prosecuting people over this, but it's the law taking the easy way to accomplish something. It's akin to arresting johns and trying to make the market for prostitution dry up.

I think it's universally agreed that kiddie porn is some pretty bad stuff and its purveyors should be shut down, but just about the only way they have of finding the distributors is by finding users to rat them out.

Personally, I have no problem with taking kiddie porn out of the realm of protected speech. I have problems with overzealous prosecutions and extending the prohibition to absurd lengths, but it eventually comes down to a choice of protecting kids or speech, and I'll vote for protecting the kids.

There are gray areas, of course-- there are always gray areas. Fictional depictions like in the film "Salo," family pictures of a baby in a bathtub... We can argue over their worth or whether they are porn, and sometimes do silly things, but real child abuse remains child abuse, and there's little we shouldn't do to stop it.

First, porn, including kiddie porn, can be created via computer manipulation of digital images.

True, but the Supreme Court has already thrown out the law banning computer generated pedophilia, because it recognized that no crime was committed in its creation. Nobody has ever been convicted and imprisoned for posessing computer generated porn, and that's not what we're talking about here. Put away the straw-man.

Those who commit the actual act are the ones who should be pursued and prosecuted, not those who possess images of the act

One huge difference. If you were a paid member of a website that photographed the proprietors murdering innocent people, if your money actually helped to pay the expenses of the murderers, would you be so quick to absolve yourself of responsibility? Make no mistake of it, there are magazines, web sites, movie companies, and thousands of independent freelancers who make plenty of money off kiddie porn, and its the USERS who buy the porn that support the whole operation. Even if you grab "free" images off of Usenet or the Web, it's a fair bet that the poster is either trying to hook you into spending money, or he's looking for "psychological support" for his crimes...which can be just as bad as financial support because it normalizes the behavior.

Kiddie porn should never be legalized. The people who take the pictures should be improsoned for VERY long terms, and the people who enjoy the pictures should be punished and then treated for mental problems (being turned on by a child isn't normal...it indicates a pretty severe sexual/psychological disorder).

Strikes me as a rather liberal interpretation of individual rights. The long term impact hasn't been adequately studied - Such actions could have a multi-generational impact...

(snip)
He said he had no clue how the rogue software showed up on his computer. "I never download anything. and as far as I knew, no others had," he said.

(snip)
Mr. Green, who now lives with his son and his 83-year-old mother in the nearby town of Paignton, said that it was possible that some member of his family had accidentally infected the computer in that way. "I know my son had a look at some iffy sites," he said. "He's a teenager."

------

Um, I think we know how that virus got on your computer, Mr. Green; it appears you do, too. For the record, try not to contradict yourself within the same article (looks bad, ya know?).

mikey_the_rat

MANY overseas websites can deploy these trojans. Some 'security' sites (read hacker) deploy these things, and I've had my homepage changed more times than I can count...

Hackers/Crackers/Skript Kiddies plant these things on peoples computers to give themselves a "backdoor" into some innocent Internet users computer, and then upload all kinds of illegal junk to the computer (kiddie porn, stolen software and movies, the map to Saddams hideout). After they have their stuff uploaded, they post the hacked computers location and login info on Usenet, IRC, or even websites so that their compatriots can download it. Voila, a quick, untraceable distribution method for illegal computer material that will remain active until the computers owner notices the hit in bandwidth and goes investigating. Even if the police DO find the material via the Internet, it's only traceable to the innocent persons hacked computer.

The ONLY way to prevent yourself from becoming an innocent victim to this scheme is to ALWAYS run a personal firewall. You can get ZoneAlarm for free, or a dozen other competing products for reasonable rates.

use Proximtron too- without doubt the best pop-up stopping, script blocking and ad busting app out there- even blocks flash ads. If you like to read newspapers online, this litte freeware baby will make your life infinitely more pleasurable.

Be sure to read the help files- you have to configure your browser to use it....

Get a Mac! I just don't see how you folks deal with all this shit without going insane. My work box is a Wintel POS, and I'm constantly fighting popups, viruses, etc. etc. At home on my Mac I've never had a popup, never had a virus, nothing. Hell, I didn't even install my Norton anti-virus software after the last time I formatted my hard drive, and for six years my machine has been fine. Get a Mac and never deal with any of that again.

Almost all of the spyware, trojanware, pornware, and adware gets installed on your computer from two sources:

1. Internet Explorer

and

2. Peer-to-peer file sharing software


The best way to solve all of your problems is to just switch from IE to mozilla for your browser of choice.

www.mozilla.org


Personal firewalls are okay, but they do not stop the root of the problem, which is software being installed on your system that you do not want there.

That demonstrates how ill informed most of us are concerning computers and the internet.

Myth- It is neccessary to click an exe. file in order to activate a trojan. a virus or a worm.

Myth- A firewall, such as Zone Alarm will protect your computer from intrusions such as trojans and worms.

Myth- There could never be evidence of kiddie porn on my computer since I have never visited a porn site or downloaded any type of pornographic or adult material.

Myth- A protection such as Spybot or Adaware will remove any connections or cookies that relate to sites I have visited.

Myth- As long as I keep my virus protection up to date and run regular virus checks my computer will be free of trojans, viruses and spyware.

Myth- An interest in adult entertainment (porongraphy if that suits you) is an indication of an interest in child pornography or kiddie porn.

Myth- If I don't do anything illegal I have nothing to fear from overzealous prosecuters or laws that inhibit my freedom of speach.

Myth- If I do get any kind of infection, invasion, traces of illegal items or whatever I can safely remove them with a format of my hard drive and clean install of my OS.

Myth- The use of marijuana is directly to or will lead to the ultimate use of more dangerous and addictive substances such as herion and cocaine.

Myth - President George W. Bush is a compassionate and christian conservative.

Myth- If I place this tooth under my pillow when I go to bed, the tooth fairy will leave a quarter in it's place in the morning when I wake up.

Myth- The meek shall inherit the earth.

and how do you get rid of them? My computer runs all the time after it's turned off so I'm worried.

to kick this back up to get some expert assistance.

I found many quarters under my pillow from the tooth fairy when I was a kid.

Don

But I have a caveat regarding this qoute:

Myth- If I do get any kind of infection, invasion, traces of illegal items or whatever I can safely remove them with a format of my hard drive and clean install of my OS.


The key word that you used was "format". If a low-level format is done to your hard drive before reinstalling the OS then the *all* information has been wiped and no one will be able to get any information from before you performed the low-level format.

For those that don't know, a low-level format writes 0's over each and every sector on your harddrive. This means it erases everything. You usually need a special utility like gdisk to perform a low-level format. There is even a department of defense specified low-level format that writes over each sector 7 times.

This does not mean that your ISP won't have logs of where you have been, but those logs are not (or at least should not be) thurough enough to prove that you had actuall kiddie-porn (or warez or metallica mp3's or whatever) on your computer.


Other then that, right on.

Will not remove all traces from your hard drive. Why do you think that the program that the defense department uses is not available for public consumption?

In addition, after the DOD uses the 7X format the hard drives are smashed into pieces with hammer. I would suggest a very strong magnet, a very large hammer and a boat trip to the deepest part of the Atlantic.

Hard drive technology is pretty open, and while yes, the DOD does smash their drives with a hammer, the amount of work needed to get data off a drive after it has been low-leveled seven times is pretty high. No prosecuter will be able to justify any data retrived and indeed, if you had a good lawyer, any retrived data could be shown to be non-reliable.

The standards of a court-case tend to be alot higher then what a spy might find valuable about our millitary.


Of course I am fully aware that Herr Ashcroft and his SS will probably not have any problems using such data, but I would still argue that they would have a very difficult time finding it if a DOD low-level wipe was performed. If I trully feared that Bushco was after me, I would probably do exactly what you said. But we were talking about kiddie-porn accidently appearing on your pc. Most DA's will not have access to DOD grade tools.


Oh, and the Mississppi would probabaly do the trick just as well as the Atlantic. :)

turn a on/off switch from off to on??

Sounds to me like he installed AOL. :p