Of all the sinister things that Internet viruses do, this might be the worst: They can make you an unsuspecting collector of child pornography. Heinous pictures and videos can be deposited on computers by viruses — the malicious programs better known for swiping your credit card numbers. In this twist, it's your reputation that's stolen. Pedophiles can exploit virus-infected PCs to remotely store and view their stash without fear they'll get caught. Pranksters or someone trying to frame you can tap viruses to make it appear that you surf illegal Web sites. Whatever the motivation, you get child porn on your computer — and might not realize it until police knock at your door. An Associated Press investigation found cases in which innocent people have been branded as pedophiles after their co-workers or loved ones stumbled upon child porn placed on a PC through a virus. It can cost victims hundreds of thousands of dollars to prove their innocence. Their situations are complicated by the fact that actual pedophiles often blame viruses — a defense rightfully viewed with skepticism by law enforcement. “It's an example of the old ‘dog ate my homework' excuse,†says Phil Malone, director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “The problem is, sometimes the dog does eat your homework.†The AP's investigation included interviewing people who had been found with child porn on their computers. The AP reviewed court records and spoke to prosecutors, police and computer examiners. One case involved Michael Fiola, a former investigator with the Massachusetts agency that oversees workers' compensation. In 2007, Fiola's bosses became suspicious after the Internet bill for his state-issued laptop showed that he used 4½ times more data than his colleagues. A technician found child porn in the PC folder that stores images viewed online. Fiola was fired and charged with possession of child pornography, which carries up to five years in prison. He endured death threats, his car tires were slashed and he was shunned by friends. Fiola and his wife fought the case, spending $250,000 on legal fees. They liquidated their savings, took a second mortgage and sold their car. An inspection for his defense revealed the laptop was severely infected. It 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 Fiolas say they have health problems from the stress of the case. They say they've talked to dozens of lawyers but can't get one to sue the state, because of a cap on the amount they can recover. “It ruined my life, my wife's life and my family's life,†he says. The Massachusetts attorney general's office, which charged Fiola, declined interview requests. At any moment, about 20 million of the estimated 1 billion Internet-connected PCs worldwide are infected with viruses that could give hackers full control, according to security software maker F-Secure Corp. Computers often get infected when people open e-mail attachments from unknown sources or visit a malicious Web page. Pedophiles can tap viruses in several ways. The simplest is to force someone else's computer to surf child porn sites, collecting images along the way. Or a computer can be made into a warehouse for pictures and videos that can be viewed remotely when the PC is online. “They're kind of like locusts that descend on a cornfield: They eat up everything in sight and they move on to the next cornfield,†says Eric Goldman, academic director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. Goldman has represented Web companies that discovered child pornographers were abusing their legitimate services. But pedophiles need not be involved: Child porn can land on a computer in a sick prank or an attempt to frame the PC's owner. In the first publicly known cases of individuals being victimized, two men in the United Kingdom were cleared in 2003 after viruses were shown to have been responsible for the child porn on their PCs. In one case, an infected e-mail or pop-up ad poisoned a defense contractor's PC and downloaded the offensive pictures. In the other, a virus changed the home page on a man's Web browser to display child porn, a discovery made by his 7-year-old daughter. The man spent more than a week in jail and three months in a halfway house, and lost custody of his daughter. Chris Watts, a computer examiner in Britain, says he helped clear a hotel manager whose co-workers found child porn on the PC they shared with him. Watts found that while surfing the Internet for ways to play computer games without paying for them, the manager had visited a site for pirated software. It redirected visitors to child porn sites if they were inactive for a certain period. In all these cases, the central evidence wasn't in dispute: Pornography was on a computer. But proving how it got there was difficult. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/tech/news/6710095.html
Wow. Some of the things that can happen just by searching the web... Do they say an actual effective way of stopping this from happening? Or any tips? Or something?
Just be careful. Don't go to sites that look suspicious, and always have firewall and antivirus software on your pc. Maybe, I don't know their techniques to check if those are really from viruses or not.
That's really kind of freaky. To think that at any moment a cop could show up at my door because a pedophile hacker decided to use my computer as the most external of all external hard drives for his stash.
Sick pranks? This planet is beginning to sicken me. Someone thinks it's funny to get someone sent the jail and ruin their life completely? People today are getting worse and worse. This is just incredibly low. Did they find out who infected Fiola's PC?
I'm not surprised. People just find more worse things everyday. Though it is harsh and unfair I guess it's just how the world is today. It is kind of scary wondering what would happen if I got framed for Child Porn by a hacker.
why do people say humans are smarter than animals again really if they want to see porn so bad make a youtube account and fav a lot of them i had a virus like that for Windows Live Messenger so when my friends got online my name send them a web site for porn
YouTube doesn't have porn. If anyone would try to upload it'd be flagged pretty soon. Wisdom of experience here.
Because they are. There's no porn on youtube. If you're talking about YouPorn, that's irrelevant because that website contains legal porn, which the creator of this virus was obviously not interested in. Anyway, it's starting to scare me that just browsing the internet can land me in the slammer. And it scares me even more that people are getting away with illegal internet activities. IMO the internet should be regulated more.
