I had a horrid experience today, discovering during the lunch hour that my retired site http://www.nationalgaynews.com/, had been hacked into by an unknown party who basically seized my online newspaper and instead uploaded very graphic pornography onto the home page of what had been a news site.
In a frenzy, I tracked down my webmaster, server, and IT people to learn that the site was being run by an older type of program which had not been modernized, and was thus left open to corruption by third parties. Indeed, it had been pirated, commandeered, and stolen from me.
The tekkies who know of this kind of thing told me “You are running a very old Joomla installation (1.0.12) that has many security holes and is no longer supported, you'll have to upgrade to the latest version ASAP otherwise your site will be hacked again and your account will be subject to service suspension or termination per our ToS.”
Ironically, I stopped publishing the exhasutive news site months ago, and just re-linked it up to the 'Net so interested readers and researchers could at least access our first year of news online. Now I have had to temporarily shut it down again until I can clean it up and find a better security system. But there is a reason why this is more a story for my law blog than my gay news blog though. (http://www.nationalgaynews.blogspot.com/) Here’s why.
Just yesterday, Debra Weiss on the ABA journal posted an article about how computer viruses can upload child porn to your computer, the result of which has led to the arrest and prosecution of numerous individuals.
A few months ago we did a story and joked about the guy who said his kitten downloaded child pornography to his web site, but the Associated Press has done an investigation this year which revealed that innocent people have been branded as pedophiles after their co-workers or loved ones stumbled upon child porn placed on a PC through a virus.
AP cited the case of Michael Fiola, a former investigator with the Massachusetts agency that oversees workers' compensation. An Internet bill for his state-issued laptop showed he was using more than four times the online data of his colleagues. An investigation found child porn stored in a folder that contains images viewed online.
Fiola was fired and charged with possession of child pornography. He spent $250,000 on legal fees before prosecutors dropped charges. An inspection of the laptop had found it was programmed to visit as many as 40 child porn sites per minute.
"It ruined my life, my wife's life and my family's life," Fiola told AP.
While some prosecutors have discounted this, I think of the Innocence Project, revelations relating to DNA, and how many times people in power are wrong. So there is a moral here, and it begins with protect your computer from unknown users the same way you don’t lend your car to your best friend’s son.
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