Computer Virus Led Police to Erased Child Porn Files
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By Stuart Arnold  A COMPUTER virus inadvertently helped police to catch a paedophile who accessed thousands of child porn images.
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File-recovery software can resurrect every piece of porn and propaganda you've emptied out of your computer's Recycle Bin. It looks as if they're removed from the hard drive, but the 1s and 0s of the "deleted" files still exist. Wired's How To Wiki shows you a couple of ways to leave no trace behind.
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A technology expert explains how police broke up a global online porn ringâand why their methods should be a deterrent to future networks.
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Police have indicated there will be hundreds more arrests as part of Australia&#39;s largest ever crackdown on child pornography. Authorities have so far charged more than 190 people with a total of 2000 offences
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MORE Territory arrests are expected as a massive Internet child pornography sting envelopes the country. Nine Territorians have already been charged in the covert police operation, including one former Darwin teacher.
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An unpatched flaw in antivirus software compromises student data in Colorado.
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Brad Willman was installing networking equipment out of an emergency van in British Columbia when a policeman showed up and asked for him. Willman knew the officer from a case he was involved with a couple of years earlier, so he didn&#39;t worry -- until he arrived at the police station and was introduced to a couple of U.S. cops.The visit marked the end of Willman&#39;s version of vigilante justice.A Trojan Horse Used For GoodIt was 2000, and Willman was 19. He had spent the last few years surreptitiously distributing a Trojan horse program to more than 1,000 people to try to uncover child-porn activities. All told, Willman said his work sent around 70 people to prison.But then Willman stumbled on a prominent California judge. He discovered that Ronald Kline, at the time a superior court judge in Orange County, had a big collection of child porn and a diary on his PC indicating he was planning to try to seduce young boys. The high-profile case put an end to Willman&#39;s career as a crime-fighter.&quot;Oh, I knew it was illegal,&quot; Willman said in a recent phone&#160;interview. &quot;But I really didn&#39;t care. I felt if I&#39;m helping a few people in the process, cool.&quot; Until Kline, Willman had managed to stay anonymous.The Origins of the ProgramWillman didn&#39;t initially set out to chase child pornographers. He started out developing a program designed to compete with pcAnywhere, Symantec&#39;s software that lets users access computers remotely.But then, while discussing programming on various newsgroups, he had a conversation with a Canadian man who offered his six-year-old daughter to Willman.&quot;That was an awkward scenario,&quot; Willman says, putting it mildly.Willman quickly contacted the police, who were able to prosecute the Edmonton man, he said.&quot;He&#39;s more or less what altered my mind from competing with pcAnywhere to making a Trojan to see who else is doing this,&quot; he said.Willman used the work he&#39;d already developed on the program to trick suspected pedophiles into unknowingly downloading the software so that he could get proof from their computers.How Willman Used the Trojan HorseWillman would visit child-porn newsgroups and post his program as a file that looked like it contained a photo. In order to avoid suspicion, Willman built in an additional feature. When the program launched without opening a photo, he designed it so that the first time it loaded it would display any photo from the directory to the user.After someone downloaded the software, Willman could look through their files remotely for illicit documents or photos.Once he found damning information, he&#39;d copy and share it with various child-porn watchdog groups, who could then pursue the perpetrators.Everything changed when Kline downloaded the Trojan and Willman found damning evidence on the judge&#39;s computer.Willman passed the information on to one of the watchdog groups as usual and figured that was that -- until the day the police showed up while he was at work.The police from the U.S. told him that they found him through correspondence sent from his computer to one of the watchdog groups.While the police were initially friendly because Willman was able to give them additional information on Kline, they later told him that if he does any more hacking, ever, they&#39;ll arrest him. Willman signed an agreement that he wouldn&#39;t hack and that he wouldn&#39;t have anything to do with child porn.Legal Barriers to Willman&#39;s VigilantismVarious state and federal laws in the U.S. criminalize unauthorized access to computers, said Jeff Neuburger, an attorney specializing in technology at Thelen Reid Brown Raysman &amp; Steiner, an international law firm based in New York City. If Willman hadn&#39;t agreed to the deal with the police, he could have been charged with violating state or federal laws. But even in that case, so long as he didn&#39;t set foot in the U.S., it would have been difficult for American authorities to prosecute him, Neuburger said.He&#39;s seeing more and more cases like Willman&#39;s, where people are using the Internet to accomplish good, but sometimes with questionable means. &quot;In the U.S., prosecutors are careful not to let something like this go without sending a message that what the person did was wrong,&quot; he said. &quot;But they may not aggressively seek a severe sentence or punishment.&quot;One problem with vigilante work like Willman&#39;s is that someone might make a mistake and affect innocent people, Neuburger warned. HadWillman wrongly accused someone, he could have faced much bigger legal problems. &quot;It&#39;s a dangerous thing,&quot; he said.Retiring the TrojanHis days in the spotlight behind him, Willman, now 27, lives with his parents in Langley, B.C., where he does phone tech support for a small cable company. He does computer repair on the side and dreams of becoming a computer security researcher.As for Kline, he was sentenced earlier this year to 27 months in prison, a sentence that Willman called &quot;reasonable.&quot;Once in a while, Willman still gets a request from someone asking for his help in busting someone involved with child porn. He can only refer them to the watchdog groups he was familiar with.&quot;I would like to help these people get their kids in a better position, but I can&#39;t because the type of research I&#39;d have to do is stuff I&#39;m not allowed to do anymore,&quot; he said.Even though Willman knew his actions were illegal, he didn&#39;t consider the consequences. &quot;I thought I covered my tracks pretty well,&quot; he said.&quot;And I did until the Judge Kline thing. I didn&#39;t really think I&#39;d get busted.&quot;
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Police took up pursuit in cyberspace after a young Norwegian posted on the Internet video of his wild car driving.Comment
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Company's eTrust software detects a Windows file as a virus and deletes it, causing some servers to crash and fail to reboot.
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Cached images were in his possession A man who admitted using his computer to view pornographic images of child abuse cannot go free just because he did not deliberately save the images, a US court has said. The ruling overturns a previous acquittal of the man.â¦
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LONDON -- British police, aided by US authorities, have smashed a global Internet pedophile ring that broadcast live-streamed videos of children being abused, investigating more than 700 suspects worldwide and rescuing 31 children in a 10-month probe, officials said yesterday .
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By Jeff Hood, The Record, Stockton, Calif.  Feb. 23--LODI -- Lodi police officials have decided to block department computers from accessing MySpace.com because of employees' apparent interest in the social networking Web site.
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Australian police have charged almost 200 people -- including child care workers, doctors and teachers - - in the nation&#39;s largest crackdown on child pornography.
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For parents, the list of those arrested in Australia&#39;s biggest child pornography bust makes sobering reading. Teachers, doctors, health workers, police officers and the owner of three Melbourne
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LONDON - Police shattered a global Internet pedophile ring, rescuing 31 children and rounding up more than 700 suspects worldwide, British authorities said Monday.  Some 200 suspects are based in the United Kingdom, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection center said.
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A former Fairfax County sheriff's deputy and youth football coach pleaded guilty yesterday to a child pornography charge after investigators found more than 6,000 images of child pornography on his computer, including some depicting girls as young as 4 engaged in sexual activity with adult males,...
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Using high tech know-how and old fashioned police work, net detectives are cleaning up the web.