Just when we were thinking it was safe to go back on the computer, we are informed of another PC virus threat---
Child Porn Virus! It has been discovered that pedophiles or just malicious hackers can put a virus on your computer that will open hundreds of illegal child porn web sites and load your computer down with child pornography while you go innocently, unsuspecting about your business. Suddenly the police are at your door and your world is turned inside out and upside down. And the bad thing about all this, is that true pedophiles use this as a defense when they get caught.
An investigation has shown that many innocent people have been branded as pedophiles after their family, employers, or co-workers have found pornography on their infected computers. A Massachusetts man found out just how real this threat can be when, unknowingly, his computer became infected with a virus that was programmed to visit as many as 40 porn sites per minute. His bosses became suspicious when his company supplied laptop showed that he used 4-1/2 times more data space than any of his co-workers. The man was fired, arrested, and spent over $250,000 on defense lawyers. It wasn't until after all this that he was finally cleared of the charges when his computer was discovered to be severely infected.
Of the estimated one billion Internet connected PC's worldwide, about twenty million are already infected with viruses that can remotely control many different functions of the computer. Viruses can enter your computer in a number of ways---most commonly through opened emails or visiting malicious web sites.
"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. The first publicly known cases were discovered in the United Kingdom when two men were cleared after their computers were proven to be infected by the viruses in 2003. So, this threat is not something new, it just may not have been as well publicized as we would like to have it. It is certainly something that we should all be aware of and keep our guard up against.
Since that time, there have been many cases of child pornography viruses that have caused many innocent people to lose custody of their children, loss of jobs, loss of family and friends; not to mention the blight on their reputations. In all these cases, the central evidence was not in dispute---the porn was there. The hard part was proving how it got there.
Many prosecutors say blaming a computer virus for child porn is a new version of an old ploy.
"We call it the SODDI defense: Some Other Dude Did It," says James Anderson, a federal prosecutor in Wyoming.
It can be impossible to tell with certainty how a file got onto a PC.
"Computers are not to be trusted," says Jeremiah Grossman, founder of WhiteHat Security Inc. He describes it as "painfully simple" to get a computer to download something the owner doesn't want - whether it's a program that displays ads or one that stores illegal pictures. It's possible, Grossman says, that more illicit material is waiting to be discovered.
The only thing a person can really do is use the best anti-virus protection available and hope it is enough.
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