![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
This is interesting to anyone who has a computer. It can happen to you, even without maleware. It is possible for bad material to get on your computer other ways as well. Organizations, if they want to avoid wrongful dismissal of employees should be cognizant of this as well.
Slashdot | Man Fired When Laptop Malware Downloaded Porn
“The Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents fired worker Michael Fiola and initiated procedutes to prosecute him for child pornography when they determined that internet temporary files on his laptop computer contained child porn. According to Fiola, “My boss called me into his office at 9 a.m. The director of the Department of Industrial Accidents, my immediate supervisor, and the personnel director were there. They handed me a letter and said, “You are being fired for a violation of the computer usage policy. You have pornography on your computer. You’re fired. Clean out your desk. Let’s go.” Fiola said, “They wouldn’t talk to me. They said, “We’ve been advised by our attorney not to talk to you.” However, prosecutors dropped the case when a state investigation of his computer determined there was insufficient evidence to prove he had downloaded the files. Computer forensic analyst Tami Loehrs, who spent a month dissecting the computer for the defense, explained in a 30-page report that the laptop was running corrupted virus-protection software, and Fiola was hit by spammers and crackers bombarding its memory with images of incest and pre-teen porn not visible to the naked eye. The virus protection and software update functions on the laptop had been disabled, and apparently the laptop was “crippled” by malware. According to Loehrs, “When they gave him this laptop, it had belonged to another user, and they changed the user name for him, but forgot to change the SMS user name, so SMS was trying to connect to a user that no longer existed… It was set up to do all of its security updates via the server, and none of that was happening because he was out in the field.” A malware script on the machine surfed foreign sites at a rate of up to 40 per minute whenever the machine was within range of a wireless site.”
Probe shows kiddie porn rap was bogus - BostonHerald.com “A child porn possession charge lodged against a Department of Industrial Accidents investigator fired for having smut on his state-issued laptop has been dismissed because experts concluded he was unwittingly spammed.”
A Misconfigured Laptop, a Wrecked Life ABC News: Why PC Problems May Not Be Your Fault “When the Commonwealth of Massachusetts issued Michael Fiola a Dell Latitude in November 2006, it set off a chain of events…”
