Fergie's Tech Blog

Trojan Horse Leads to Child Porn Convictions

Declan McCullagh writes on C|Net's "Police Blotter":

In early 2000, a computer hacker who used the now-defunct e-mail address unknownuser1069@hotmail.com seeded a Usenet newsgroup called alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen with a clever bit of malicious Windows software.

The Trojan horse program, called SubSeven or Sub7, can look innocuous. But once installed, it installs a backdoor in the victim's computer and can allow files to be extracted and a keystroke logger to be installed.

SubSeven did its job. On July 16, 2000, "1069" sent e-mail to the Montgomery, Ala., Police Department saying, "I found a child molester on the Net." The e-mail included an attached photograph of what looked like a girl no older than 6 being sexually abused.

At the urging of Montgomery Police Capt. Kevin Murphy, "1069" eventually turned over more and more information that led back to a computer owned by Bradley Joseph Steiger, who had worked as an emergency room physician in Alabama. The hacker's finds included information from Steiger's AT&T WorldNet account, records from his checking account, and a list of directories on his computer's hard drive where sexually explicit photographs were stored.

posted by Fergie @ 8/25/2006 10:22:00 AM