Police probably created a honey pot just for him and got him to click on too many images and OK buttons.

about the conspiracy theory; read “paranoid and farfetched”! However, the technology is out there, why dismiss the possibility of authorities using it? but you’re right, my scenario (which is an example) is full of holes.

and about innocent people opening a file which contains a virus… leading to a possible false arrest…. well that’s when the keylogger comes into the story; it saves all your keystrokes, thus investigators can see how many times you opened the specific file and how many similar ones you viewed.

and about pornography fanciers being extremely careful…. well do you know this guy called Catterson?

If you wish to wipe walware from your computer… check or check this one

And also one for WalWare? Google search doesnt seem too fruitful

And I still can’t see how the police would go about this in a specific targeted way.. You can’t just blanket-send “hot 8yr old” files to the bulk of the internet and assume that only those interested in child pornography would open it. The scenario simply doesn’t seem feasible.

Ill take your point about there likely being sealed off secret protected online environments where nasty people can get child pornography, but I also imagine these would be pretty secure and clean.. if anything, I imagine child pornography fanciers are extremely careful

viruses get encoded in the codec! avi files are compressed with the use of a codec, usually divx, xvid or radius. these can easily be infected, yet, modern virus scanners block these files. in the past – the napster and kazaa era – many computers did get damaged by trojan horses (some of which contained spyware) and other variants.

However, the above post concerns someone who downloaded pictures. These pictures come from illegal (and therefore unprotected) websites. Your point is correct, in addition though, I like to say, these photographs can very easily be infected too (via the compression + via the packing, zipping, rar).

And now for the most common way to infect someone’s computer: spread a file saying something along the lines of “hot-chick”, yet, don’t have the file contain a hot chick, but something evil (for instance a code redirecting the user to a server containing auto-install software). Authorities (police) could do this (they are not spreading illegal pictures but suggest they do; comparable to a police officer asking you to buy cocaine, while never intending to do this, and arrest you when you agree to do so.

Okay and finaly, these illegal photographs probably did not get spread via common peer2peer software (such as k-lite, bittorrent, edonkey/mule, dc++, but via programs that get blocked by your firewall and your virus scanner (meaning, the user has to shut these off in order to download files).

If people wouldve discovered how to infect PCs through mp3s or mpegs or avis, all hell wouldve broken loose long ago

its true however that if you browse illegal sites – i have had this experience with crack/keygen sites etc – that certain scripts will try to exploit loopholes in IE or FF, so there you might be right; but its still a long shot for official authorities to get involved here

If the police would be spreading illegal software in whatever way, I would oppose it. But I don’t see how they effectively could short of hiring hackers to specifically target individuals. Without them, they’d have to run a child pornography website (since regular porn is legal) and that in itself would already be too disturbing.

By the way, don’t you mean “malware” ?

How about this – it might sound a little paranoid and farfetched – what if police or other forms of authority spread a file containing (child) pornography and with it a virus/keylogger/tracker as bate to lure in pedophiles? My immediate response would be, go for it, use it to pull a confession or a way to locate these perverts…. however, coming back to the divx example, what about milder instances? Can copyright watchdogs use similar techniques? Where do you draw the line?

Even if the keylogger or any other form of walware/spyware is installed prior to its examination, I think its use in court is questionable. Cattersons case is new; I don’t think the use of spyware to gather evidence has been done before, it therefore seems logical to investigate upon this point.

i dont see a problem with this until the police is actually allowed to install keyloggers or similar software. That’s unacceptable