Man Fired When Laptop Malware Downloaded Porn

Geoffrey.landis writes "The Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents fired worker Michael Fiola and initiated procedures 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."

Certainly sounds fair...

[Raineer (1002750)]

Good to know they researched heavily before firing him. At my company when re-deploying hardware like a laptop it is standard to wipe it completely and load a ghosted image. Who WOULDN'T do at least as much?

Re:Certainly sounds fair...

[Secrity (742221)]

They did fire him -- they fired him and never asked any questions. The investigation was by the prosecutor, not his employer. I wonder if he will be hired back with back pay.

Re:Certainly sounds fair...

[wtfispcloadletter (1303253)]

Then there's projects like Unattended that work great and can have a laptop or workstation back up and running in a default state, with all programs and updates applied in 60-90 minutes.

There is no excuse for giving someone a used laptop or workstation that hasn't been cleaned. We don't concern ourselves much with our workstations since they never leave our network, but any laptops get a thorough cleansing before being re-issued to someone else.

Re:Certainly sounds fair...

[Raineer (1002750)]

Maybe somebody without Ghost?

If you don't have something similar to Ghost, then you sure as hell don't fire someone with something illegal on the HDD. That is one certain way to open yourself (as a company) up to lawsuits. If you cannot prove what was on the laptop when you gave it to him, the firing surely is on shaky grounds.

Why? lots of reasons

[davidwr (791652)]

* to disrupt society
* to provide a plausible alibi for any of his perverted friends
* to drive up the cost of prosecuting this type of crime so prosecutors will have less money to prosecute his brother-in-law who runs an organized crime family
* kicks/jollies/juvenile reasons
* someone paid him to do it
* Why ask why
* He wanted his work to get on CowboyNealBoard, er, I mean Slashdot

Re:Lawyer: This, boys and girls, is why . . .

[jythie (914043)]

Because the sites the malware connects through pay via click through.

What that bit of malware probably did was go around to a bunch of sites that the author gets fees from and makes it look like someone is browsing them.

Get a botnet of 1,000 computers going and it looks like hacker X convinced 1,000 people to view the site over and over.

Re:Lawyer: This, boys and girls, is why . . .

[Kjella (173770)]

Personally, I'm skeptical about the idea of malware that secretly downloads and hides kiddie porn--why would the malware developer do that? I really can't fault the emploeyr for not considering such an idea and investigating it.

Providing a layer of protection between the source nad the potential customers? I doubt an ad server serving up illegal images would be alive for very long.

Re:Lawyer: This, boys and girls, is why . . .

[vux984 (928602)]

Personally, I'm skeptical about the idea of malware that secretly downloads and hides kiddie porn--why would the malware developer do that?

I've actually seen this sort of thing a couple times... not for kiddie porn luckily. Just movies (hollywood) and warez back before p2p.

As you can imagine finding servers to host and distribute this sort of stuff can be difficult. So why not compromise some random persons laptop, setup an ftp server, irc, dynamic dns, and whatever else... and then use it as a free and 'anonymous' remote host and storage.

It wouldn't surprise me in the least that this could be in use for kiddie porn distribution.

I really can't fault the emploeyr for not considering such an idea and investigating it.

When dealing with any case of child abuse including kiddie porn, one should ALWAYS be extremely cautious. Because whether he is innocent or not, people will never look at him the same way again.

yet another

[Brian Gordon (987471)]

case where you can't help but think "this can't be right".. making certain types of information illegal to possess just doesn't make practical sense in the context of the Internet, no matter how morally objectionable we find it.

Alas

[rustalot42684 (1055008)]

If people hadn't jumped to conclusions and had done a more thorough investigation, this man would not have lost his job and reputation.

A poorer man would've been convicted

[davidwr (791652)]

I've heard of people getting screwed by their bosses before but this is ridiculous.

If he hadn't had the resources to hire his own expert, he would be in prison and branded a sex offender for life, all because his boss didn't practice safe hex.

Tough lesson learned...

[Muckluck (759718)]

This is a tough lesson learned for Mr. Fiola, but the lesson is, always request a clean build when receiving new equipment in the workplace. That would have eliminated the malware and given him a clean system to work on.

Re:Tough lesson learned...

[oldspewey (1303305)]

And how does the average corporate employee even know whether he/she has a "clean build" when issued a new laptop. Most times a laptop arrives pre-imaged with an OS and a standard suite of software tools. Unless you go poking around the filesystem you can't really tell how "clean" the machine is.

Dayam.

[Penguinisto (415985)]

Man... reason # 10,297,668 why I primarily use Linux as my desktop @ work.

Not that Linux (or OSX, or any of 'em for that matter) are 100% crack-proof, but putting one's career at the mercy of common malware and the only safety net is a sharp eye at the IT department?

OTOH, I suspect this guy (if he plays his cards right and has a sharp lawyer on retainer) may never have to work another day in his life.

/P

The real crime here...

[adsl (595429)]

The real crime here is that the charges were dropped thru "insufficient evidence".... Why is this loophole allowed to prosecutors? How about. "We are sorry we should never have arrested you, fired you and will will formally erradicate all your arrest process so it never happened and give you backed dated pay and legal expenses".

Re:The real crime here...

[LostCluster (625375)]

The real problem is that, as the summary said, they didn't change the security software username, and killed the old username at the server. Therefore, he was running unupdated software... leaving him open to any new Internet threat. Sounds like the IT Department deserves to be fired.

Telling quote from TFA

[GroeFaZ (850443)]

"As soon as you mention child pornography, everybody's senses go out the window, she [the computer forensics expert] said."

Sounds too familiar. What's really fucked up is that his former employers "stand by their decision", namely to fire the guy. The bare minimum would be a public excuse, an offer to let him work there again, and probably a hefty compensation if he refused. But that's not likely to happen since by definition, the government knows best.

"We stand by our decision"

[Strange Ranger (454494)]

DIA spokeswoman Linnea Walsh confirmed Fiola "was terminated," but declined to say if any internal discipline has been meted out as a result of his name being cleared in court.

"We stand by our decision," she said.

So now the DIA is trying cover it's own ass for giving him "a ticking time bomb" and then firing him for it and ruining any social life he had.
The worst part is that the assholes at DIA responsible for the horrible "roll-out" of a replacement laptop, and the PHB's responsible for firing him w/o doing proper research into the issue will not be punished in any way. THEIR lives won't be ruined. Even if he wins a lawsuit. It'll be money from the DIA, but no real punishment to the people involved.

Somebody find all their names and contact info (I'm too lazy) and post it. Let's send the info to Russia with requests for Viagra and child porn.

Seriously though, The Office is funny on TV, but tragic in real life. These people should be arrested for harassment and criminal negligence at the least.

What kind of laws can we enforce (and/or pass) to truly punish the individuals responsible for shit like this? Lawsuit money from the organization isn't even close to justice.

Been there to an extent

[7-Vodka (195504)]

I've worked for the state of MA and I've run into the same problem many times on their computers. Depending on where you work their IT people are really not that knowledgeable or hardworking and I can't blame them, they have to work with microsoft crap, I would be slacking too.

I was even fooled by it once. I found pr0n bookmarks under a cute girl's login and I was thinking "Daaamn this girl is a freaky.." for a few seconds until I realized what it was. I could easily see how people would jump the gun and over react when they find actual material on a computer and not just bookmarks however they should at least ASK the person if they're guilty and send it for investigation first.

Whats interesting in this story is....

[tacokill (531275)]

The fact the he was charged with child porn. I've been following this case in the news because it is such an odd case. As TFA says, they eventually figured out it was viruses and malware doing the downloading of images (over the web, BTW). Ok, fair enough.

However, another article (can't find the link, sorry) was interviewing one of the detectives involved with the case. What he said was something along the lines of "there was a LOT of porn on the computer. 99% of it was just gross stuff, not illegal. But we did find a few pics of young girls.". Which makes me wonder --- how, exactly, do they define child porn?

Are they just arresting people because pictures look young?

...or did they find real kiddie porn on there?

It just seems odd that all of a sudden there is all this kiddie porn out on the publicly available internet and it does not draw attention. I would presume, with Tor, Freenet, etc all of that activity would be driven underground (ie: encrypted). Is there really "spam" and popup based kiddie porn still going on in the WWW?

I ask because I have...err...my friend has not seen it since the early early days of the internet. Back then, you truly could stumble across it accidentally. It hasn't been that way for a long long time though, in my experience.

I saw the movie

[Ranger (1783)]

It's called Farm Sluts [youtube.com]. Hilarious! Well not for the guy in real life.

Re:What is the real truth here?

[John Hasler (414242)]

Sounds like it may have been the previous user that got the machine infected.

Julie Amero ?

[PoliTech (998983)]

Julie Amero and the Porn Pop-Ups [wikipedia.org] all over again?

Re:What is the real truth here?

[One Childish N00b (780549)]

Hey, this trick worked on my mother when she busted me with (regular) porn on the family computer back in the day. I just showed her some flashy sensationalist article from the newspaper about 'malware' and 'popups' and told her the internet must have done it. Obviously it was that evil internet that had filled her computer with pornography, and not her pure-minded, cherub-like son. Curse that evil internet.

I wonder if she ever noticed that 'the internet' preferred brunettes?

Re:I submitted to the Firehose at 6PM! on the 18th

[hummassa (157160)]

Why don't you try writing your submissions intelligently and professionally?

Because then it would eliminate any chance of them going to the /. front page? :-)