Could you face prison time for not cleaning your Spyware-infected PC?
Monday January 15, 2007 at 1:41 pm CST
Posted by Hiep Dang
We’ve seen the many cases of Spyware-makers being brought to justice and paying hefty fines because of their immoral practices and ill-gotten gains. (We hope to see more of these cases thanks to the work of the FTC, CDT, and Anti-Spyware Coalition)
We’ve seen cases of corporate espionage, like the Israeli couple who are serving time in prison for making spyware and charging companies for their services of spying and stealing data.
We’ve even seen cases of people who used Spyware with the intent of spying on their spouses getting thrown in jail. As was the case in the “Jealous Spyware Husband” who spent £100 on spyware to monitor his wife because he thought she was cheating on him and eventually killed her. He is now serving a life sentence.
But this is the first case I’ve seen where someone may receive prison time because of their negligence for not removing spyware from a PC… In Norwich, CT, a substitute teacher faces prison time because the classroom computer she was teaching with was infected with Spyware and she exposed her 7th grade students to pornographic images due to the pop-ups that the Spyware was generating. Julie Amero was convicted on Friday, January 5, 2007 of four counts of risk of injury to a minor and faces a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison.
Is it not bad enough that spyware-makers are stealing our identity, capturing our data, annoying us with pop-ups, slowing down our Internet connection, and crashing our PCs? Now they are making their victims liable for the crap that they insidiously put on our computers!
January 16th, 2007 at 6:24 am
“pop-ups that the Spyware was generating”
Just a small detail: Spyware is what sits quitely and steals your data. The pop-up generators are called adware.
January 17th, 2007 at 9:27 am
A crime did occur…to the teacher. The real criminal in the case is the person that did not want to spend the ten bucks to update the blocking software. We really need to outlaw the unauthorized dumping of advertisement bots onto a PC.
February 7th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
[…] What we have now is power far beyond most people’s abilities or desire to comprehend. It’s reaching a critical point where that ignorance can not only cost you your reputation, but also your money and your freedom. This message just isn’t reaching the people who need to hear it: the ones who are least apt to understand how to protect themselves, the people who are unlikely to be reading these technically oriented articles. […]
February 26th, 2007 at 11:05 am
[…] Never been accosted by popups? Then you’re probably not reading this. That is to say, if you’ve never had a popup problem you probably don’t access the Internet. The fact is that faulty or outdated security measures (like the old versions on the computer in Julie Amero’s case) lead to malware-infected computers. That’s why we’re constantly telling you to update your security measures and browsers. Still, porn popups and scams are problems for even the most tech-savvy users out there. In her article about the Amero case, Wired columnist Regine Lynn admits that she recently got taken to a porn site while doing an innocent Google search for horse stables. She documented the incident here. If it had happened in front of seventh graders, could Lynn be facing jail time? McAfee’s Avert Labs, an industry leader in computer security, documents several cases of spyware and adware users (the real villains behind popups) being brought to justice, but they point out that Amero’s “is the first case… where someone may receive prison time because of their negligence for not removing spyware from a PC.” […]
March 19th, 2007 at 10:58 am
after reading much about this teacher’s problem, i am left to wonder where the IT person was during all this and why mcafee has taken an attitude that the teacher was responsible for the spyware (or its removal). while the article tries to take on a tone of conciliatory feelings, it quite clearly makes claim that the teacher is negligent. how wrong can mcafee be?