Kiddie Porn Virus
“Mr. Green’s problems were only beginning. Last October, local police knocked on his door, searched his home and seized his computer. They found no sign of pornography in his home but discovered 172 images of child pornography on the computer’s hard drive. They arrested Mr. Green. This month, Mr. Green was acquitted in Exeter Crown Court after arguing that the material had been gathered without his knowledge by a rogue program created by hackers — a so-called Trojan horse — that had infected his PC, probably during innocent Internet surfing… legal experts say the technical issues raise two troubling possibilities. For one, actual child pornographers could arm themselves with a new alibi that would be difficult to disprove. Or, unknowing Web surfers could find themselves charged with possessing illegal material that a lurking software program has acquired. ‘The scary thing is not that the defense might work,’ said Mark Rasch, a former federal computer crime prosecutor. ‘The scary thing is that the defense might be right,’ and that hijacked computers could be turned to an evil purpose without an owner’s knowledge or consent.” — New York Times (US)
The frightening thing about this case is not just that it happened, that some innocent individual had his life ruined, but that it is obviously going to be happening with more and more frequency. It represents the logical criminal conclusion of several emerging trends. As more people acquire high-bandwidth “always on” connections, as distributed computing technology continues to improve, as child pornography increases its spread and thus its number of adherents, as law enforcement leans ever harder on the makers of child pornography and thus increases their incentive to off-load criminal responsibility onto someone else — as all these forces converge, it is hard not to think that kiddie-porn viruses will become as common as any other type of virus plaguing the net.
Furthermore, the really befuddling thing is not that pedophiles will try to use the existence of kiddie-porn viruses as a legal defense. If you download a bunch of child pornography, you won’t be able to get away with it just by saying, “Gee, I don’t know how it got there. It must have been a virus.” As the article points out, there are other ways of determining whether a person collected child pornography: first, they really do need the virus on their computer; second, you can obtain their usage records from their ISP; third, you can look for corroborating evidence such as material in the home or communications with known pedophiles; fourth, you can always be subject to a sting of some kind.
Consequently, the “it was a virus” defense won’t provide much legal shelter for pedophiles — except in one case. Suppose a pedophile deliberately infects his machine with a kiddie-porn virus. Perhaps he even knows enough about programming to write a pseudo-virus that downloads all his favorite kiddie porn. Suppose that he is extremely careful not to incriminate himself in any other way: he doesn’t keep copies of child fashion magazines around the house, he doesn’t molest any neighbor children. All he does is peruse the images collected by his self-inflicted virus. How could you possibly convict this person? It would be almost impossible to prove that he did anything wrong. What’s more, supposing he did write the pseudo-virus himself, it would be incriminating if his machine were the only one known to be infected with it — and therefore it would be in his own best interests to infect others with it.
And just imagine how nefariously this principle — which amounts to hiding in the crowd — could be extended. You know how much spam you get now? Imagine if someone wrote a program that spammed millions of people with kiddie porn automatically downloaded from Lolita sites. He could spam himself in order to obtain the images, and it would be almost impossible to arrest him since he would literally be distributing his guilt across a million other users.
In sum, scenarios such as this indicate that internet-based child pornography is a true Pandora’s box. Once the lid is open and thousands (or millions?) of images are floating around out there, it’s hard to imagine how the box can ever be closed shut once again.
This is a strange developement indeed… however, as the system would go… if enough people cried “virus”, nobody would listen anymore. Thus, the potentionally innocent would become guilty, and those whom were guilty that used this excuse that went free are still out there. I can’t imagine anyone writing their own trojan-porn virus, however… because prosecutors would determine through investigations if the suspect had sufficent knowledge to do so, and therefor, wouldn’t work (your theorized plan).
Ok, I have a question… Just recently I was looking at a friends “AOL Instant Messenger” profile. He is a very good friend and i trust him very much, so when there was a link in his profile that stated
“Wooaah! Check this out!!!click here!”
I thought that it might have been a nice desktop back ground, or something to that nature. After I clicked it a download started, something that I couldn’t control. It was very blunt, in the fact that it kept on stating that it wasnt a virus, worm, or Trojan horse, however after the download was complete my computer was flooded with porn and other such pages. There are even toolbars on my “Internet Explorer” that are links to pornography pages. I was wondering if anyone has heard anything about a “Porn Virus.” All I know is I keep on seeing a program which I cant delete called “ActiveX,” I’ve never seen it before. I was also wondering, I am currently job searching, and sending out resumes via e~mail, is this in jeopardy of ruining my future? If u have any comments on how to either fix the problem or what exactly it is doing to my computer please leave a comment.
There are several types of “porn viruses.” Either you’ll have to take your computer to a professional for cleaning, or research how to do it yourself using standard anti-virus utilities.
ActiveX, incidentally, is a Microsoft technology normally found on any Windows computer, so the presence of ActiveX is nothing to be alarmed about… That being said, though, it’s possible that the virus is exploiting a vulnerability in ActiveX. Again, you’d have to research it or consult with a professional.
Finally, so far as your job search is concerned — are you worried that the virus is attaching itself to your emails? If so, you need either to disinfect your computer with an anti-virus utility, or you might also consider setting up another (free) email account with hotmail.com or yahoo.com. If you send your resume using an account from hotmail or yahoo, the services scan them for viruses automatically.
Hope this helps!
you have to ctrl-alt-del and end the task a or b then go to the windows folder and delete the virus called a.exe or b.exe and then run ad-aware. which you can download on download.com for free. this should solve your problem. if not, get your computer checked out, you may have more than one virus.
the terrible thing is things like this have happend to both my roommate and myself, but we never saw anything download. suddenly i wound up with random porn sites in my favorites list and several desktop icons. my roommate got a puzzling list of porn links among the options when she back-clicked in explorer. i don’t know if she ever figured out how to get rid of it. more than anything, these “porn viruses” and crap just annoy. when it winds up being kiddie porn (thank god never gotten that) then it becomes a huge problem, but the basic “download porn to your computer” shit is just a bother. i’d like to punch people who do that crap just for being retarded.
I think that adults can view everything they can find on the web. You know , it is crazy to talk about somebody getting jail for having digital pictures. We are not a cannibals. The Goverment resposibility is to reduce amount of illigal content on the web, convict real child abusers, not an internet surfers. Please do not be crazy.
What you are talking about here is what is known as a HIJACKER PROGRAM, which can infest your computer by several means, including visiting, even briefly, a web site (which may be called up by a popup loaded from another site), being sent an email in which the program is either an extension or IS EMBEDDED IN THE MESSAGE BODY USING ACTIVE X PROGRAMMING (Which normally is used for things like animated graphics), or being downloaded by a trojan which has infected your machine previously. Some of these programs can be killed by antispyware utilities such as AdAware or Spybot Search And Destroy, but the most recent variants cannot be removed by any general purpose program of the antispyware or antivirus type; they MOST DEFINITELY CANNOT be killed by simply using crtl-alt-del and killing the task, as they frequently are programmed in a way that hides them from the Task list - they also employ various tricks that allow them to re-infect your machine even after you have deleted all visible traces, including registry entries! These are, in fact, the most tenacious and pernicious examples of malware presently being circulated.
Fortunately, most of the current varieties CAN be destroyed by a program called COOL WEB SHREDDER which was written SPECIFICALLY to remove hijacker programs, in particular ones from a family known as “Cool Web Search” that started out as a “search assistant” but has been mutated into an apparently limitless family of hijacker malware. Note that some versions of hijacker can render your machine unable to download the utilities needed to remove them and you may need to use a second machine.
Also check out www.spywareinfo.com, which has a conucopia of information about various forms of spyware including hijackers, as well as a very extensive directory of useful links that are an ideal starting point when dealing with this type of problem. You should also run a Google search on “Browser Help Objects” and the abbreviation “BHO”, which is the class of malware that most hijacker programs belong to. A program called BHO Demon is very usegful in dealing with these.
Also, a program called Hijack This! is extremely valuable, but READ THE INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE RUNNING IT.
Lastly, consider changing your browser to Mozilla Firefox, which does not contain the vulnerabilities whichy render Internet Explorer easy game to this type of exploitation.
I have not at this time seen any programs that specifically download content to an unsuspecting target machine, but the graphics embedded in the web pages that some of these hijackers steer you to are bad enough to potentially be a problem (and are retained in your Temporary Internet Files folder, which is hidden from normal users).
Hope this info helps those of you who have this kind of problem - it can be REALLY frustrating…… it took me over 3 days to clean one of my boss’s computers (that he has no idea how it could have been infected in the first place), so I definitely sympathize……
How do i clean a computer that has or had questionable items on it?
Can anyone point Me to where I can info or help on defending someone who is currently charged with child pornography? A family member of mine who is an inexperienced internet user got hit by a page-jacker program and is charged with possesion of “galleries” of underage girls. Please Help!!!
You can always remove software that’s bad by…
Doing the unthinkable… Re-provisioning or Re-installing the operation system and all the software that came with it. NOTE* ALWAYS USE A LEGAL COPY OF ANY SOFTWARE THAT YOU ARE GOING TO INSTALL!
Well that’s all i have to say. EH?
would like to send you some links to publications about my criminal
case. I was forced to confess to the
possession of child porn. My browser was hijacked while I was browsing
the web. I was redirected to illegal sites against my will. Some
illegal pictures were found on my hard drive, recovering in
unallocated clusters, without dates of file creation/download.
I do not know how courts can widely press these charges on people to
convict them, while the whole Internet is a mess.
This is my story in inquisition21.com. There is all
information about case written by Irish writer Brian
Rothery.
http://www.inquisition21.com/article~view~7~page_num~3.html
This is publication in Wired news
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,63391,00.html
This is publication in Theregester
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/13/browser_hijacking_risks/
Article in Globe and Mail newspaper
http://ctv.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040617.gttwhijac17/tech/Technology/techBN/ctv-technology
Article in ZDnet
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5344831.html
This is article in Washington Times, May 22, 2004
There is information about my case.
http://www.cato.org/cgi-bin/scripts/printtech.cgi/dailys/05-30-04.html
Article in Crime research center:
http://www.crime-research.org/news/07.22.2004/506/
Article in Dallas, TX Newspaper
http://www.crime-research.org/news/24.12.2004/862/
Child porn law was declared unconstitutional in Hennepin County, Minnesota, USA’
http://xbiz.com/news_piece.php?id=11750
“I came here to the US as political refugee from the former Soviet
Union, and, now like many other people in the US, I feel shame that
all of this can happen in the US – supposed to be the greatest
democracy in the world.”
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