http://www.kvue.com/news/Child-p*rn-Hackers-69625962.html Pedophiles using others' computers to store images by SHELTON GREEN / KVUE News Posted on November 9, 2009 at 9:37 PM Updated Tuesday, Nov 10 at 10:05 AM A disturbing trend regarding pedophiles who hack into the computers of unsuspecting victims has led to numerous arrests of innocent people nationwide. An investigation by the Associated Press suggests that some 20 million computers in the U.S. are infected with viruses enabling pedophiles to remotely store illegal images on innocent people's computers without them even knowing it. Investigators say it isn't just pedophiles who are storing child p*rn on other people's computers. It can be a prankster or someone trying to set up another person. Detective Joel Pridgeon who works in the Child Exploitation Unit for the Austin Police Department told KVUE that he has yet to see a case where child p*rn was put on an innocent person's computer by a remote hacker, however it has been a defense many attorneys for accused pedophiles have used. Detective Pridgeon won't go into details of which high-tech methods his department uses but he said police can now tell the difference between child p*rn on a computer brought there by an unsolicited virus or whether or not it was downloaded by the computer owner. "One thing, a virus is going to behave differently than a person that uses that computer. A hacker is going to have kind of a different pattern of behavior than the person who normally uses it", said Pridgeon. "We're going to spend some time to get to know the accused and see what their habits are and see about their computer usage and a lot of times that's going to lead to clues as to whether or not what we're finding belongs to them" added Pridgeon. The detective also said "when I turn in a child p*rnography case to the D.A.'s office I have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. There can't be a reasonable doubt in my cases and part of that is being able to tie the child p*rn to that person. If we can't tie it to that person we're not going to file charges", said Pridgeon. "I suspect a lot of it is done via wireless", said Dave Sanford, an Austin computer security specialists who worked for the Federal Aviation Administration for 10-years. "If you don't have a firewall protecting your network and individual firewalls potentially on your machine then people can come in and access files and again put files on your machine", said Sanford. "If you don't use wi-fi make sure it's disabled, if you do use wi-fi make sure you're using at least WPA or WPA2, the old encryption method called WEP is easily cracked, so you shouldn't be using WEP anymore" added Sanford. The computer security specialist also said "the reality is that if someone is smart enough, knowledgeable enough and really wants to attack your machine no matter who you are you can't stop them so the key is to be more secure than the vast majority of people then someone else will be a target of opportunity and not you". Austin police say if you get an e-mail from someone that you don't know, it's a very good practice to delete it and not open it at all especially if the e-mail has an attachment.
