taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Spam: WashPost: Computers Seized in Data-Theft Probe:

According to an account provided by the teenaged member of the hacker group — and confirmed by the law enforcement source who insisted on anonymity — the LexisNexis break-in was set in motion by a blast of junk e-mail. Sometime in February a small group of hackers … sent out hundreds of e-mails with a message urging recipients to open an attached file to view pornographic child images. The attachments had nothing to do with child porn; rather, the files harbored a virus (sic) that allowed the group’s members to record anything a recipient typed on his or her computer keyboard.

According to the teenage source, a police officer in Florida was among those who opened the infected e-mail message. Not long after his computer was infected with the keystroke-capturing virus, the officer logged on to his police department’s account at Accurint, a LexisNexis service provided by Florida-based subsidiary Seisint Inc. …

The young hacker said the group members then created a series of sub-accounts using the police department’s name and billing information. Over several days, the hacker said the group looked up thousands of names in the database, including friends and celebrities. The law enforcement source said the group eventually began selling Social Security numbers and other sensitive consumer information to a ring of identity thieves in California.

Tags: account, child, computer, group, hacker, message, officer, police, source, spam, virus

Funny: The Guardian’s got a new agony aunt — Buck up! Ann Widdecombe’s no-nonsense solutions to life’s knotty problems.

My husband left his wife and child for me eight months ago. I have two children, younger than his, from a previous relationship. Despite what I feel was a very reasonable divorce settlement, my husband still spends as much on his first child as he did before, and still gives his ex-wife additional money whenever she asks for it. It all amounts to easily as much as he spends on us, his new family. I think we should be his first priority now, especially as his ex-wife is a professional woman and has ample funds for everything she and her child might need. He wouldn’t be depriving them of anything. Am I right? (Name and address withheld)

(Ann’s response — best read in a shrill schoolmarmish tone…)

He should have stayed with his wife as he vowed to do when he married her. You should have married and stayed with the father of your kids. Then you wouldn’t be in this silly mess, where the only victims are the children. Goodnight.

Also, overheard: ‘(European companies) employing US-based contractors these days is a shrewd business move due to the strength of the Euro – America is like the India of Europe.’

Tags: agony, aunt, child, divorce, ex-wife, funny, guardian, husband, life, relationship, wife

Vacation: We’re back. Well, technically, my body is back, but the silver thread is reeling in somewhere over Greenland. So I’m pre-classifying my mail and looking for urgent stuff with my eyes glazing over instead of doing anything more useful.

Scams: Interesting Wired News article: ‘Cyber-blackmail artists are shaking down office workers, threatening to delete computer files or install pornographic images on their work PCs unless they pay a ransom’. ‘The e-mail typically contains a demand that unless a small fee is paid … they will attack the PC … or download onto the machine images of child pornography.’

Of course, it’s simply spammed out, and they phish in anyone who is dumb enough to take it seriously and reply. But it does raise an interesting point, which I read about last week in this interview with Pete Townshend:

‘Perhaps Townshend (was) thinking of a case at Southwark Crown Court in 1998, in which the judge made it clear what constituted possession: that you were in possession of child pornography not just if you actively downloaded it, but if it appeared on your computer screen at all.’

So that sounds like, if child-porn images are found on a PC — and it doesn’t matter how they got there — the PC’s owner is liable. So theoretically this could be exploited to cause serious legal difficulties to a UK resident with a lack of computer literacy, or a bad email client that displays images in messages from unknown senders without user approval first. Another bad law.

Funny: Andy Kershaw in North Korea: songs about revolutionary cabbage-growing.

Tags: anything, body, child, computer, mail, pornography, possession, silver, stuff, thread, vacation