Police victimized while probing Internet child porn.

February 9, 2001 7:47 AM

Police victimized while probing Internet child porn. Does this really happen??
posted by justlisa (24 comments total)

Police believe they were victimized by a hacker who latched onto the police computer phone line to view pornography. They believe the hacker stayed on the line after police walked away from the computer.

What the hell does that mean? Sounds to me like someone in the police department may be doing some salacious surfing.
posted by jpoulos at 7:56 AM on February 9, 2001

uhhh yeah...let's just apply occam's razor here.
posted by ritualdevice at 8:00 AM on February 9, 2001

How could you incur a charge on your phone bill by clicking on a link in an e-mail? This makes no sense. "The hacker stayed on the line" (?!).

Des Moines police were on an expensive line for 28 minutes in December. The police said they visited the site in question ...

Oh, for the day when we don't have to dial up a different phone number for each website!

This smells like an urban legend to me.
posted by argybarg at 8:06 AM on February 9, 2001

Here's how it works:

Grandma clicks an executable, disguised as a link. The executable then reconfigures her Dial Up Networking settings, so that the next time she tries to dial into her ISP, she's actually calling a "900"-type number in Botswana, or wherever. She's surfin' along, none the wiser, while her phone bill is getting hit for ten bucks a minute.

Moral of the story, if you hear your modem dialing lots of extra digits, then it's a pretty safe bet that something is not right.
posted by Optamystic at 8:08 AM on February 9, 2001

Optamystic's totally right. I keep hearing of that exact scenario happening these days, though not to cops, until now.
posted by Karl at 8:15 AM on February 9, 2001

All the more reason to switch to DSL.
posted by crunchland at 8:23 AM on February 9, 2001

while optamystic's story is plausible, it's not the explanation offered by the police. Their explanation reeks sounds highly suspicious. They're saying a hacker took remote control of their box and then surfed for porn while they were away from their desk.

Here's a scenario I hear a lot these days.
posted by ritualdevice at 8:36 AM on February 9, 2001

That's entirely possible, Optamystic, even likely. It's been done for years (the .exe can even kill the sound of the modem dialing).

But how a "hacker" could be involved is beyond me. It may even be perfectly innocent, where they dialed "Botswana" unknowingly and never disconnected. But the hacker-cum-bogeyman theory is far-fetched.
posted by jpoulos at 8:40 AM on February 9, 2001

Yeah, either the reporter or the cops got the details wrong, as to exactly how it happened. But last year, when I worked as a tech supervisor at an ISP, I fielded several irate calls a night from people who had fallen for this one. It's very common. The cops got scammed, it just didn't happen exactly the way they think it did.
posted by Optamystic at 8:46 AM on February 9, 2001

Optamystic, that is precisely why I posed the question. It is entirely possible that they were scammed unbeknownst to them. My local police department found out that others on the DSL loop could access their computer. They freaked out and disconnected the DSL. A $50 firewall would've solved that problem but hysteria prevailed. On the other hand, the Des Moines Register (in my opinion) does a poor job of reporting the facts. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. I just wanted to know if the scam was possible and it appears it is. Oh how I love my DSL *and* the firewall : )
posted by justlisa at 8:59 AM on February 9, 2001

Their explanation reeks sounds highly suspicious.

Their explanation just sounds like they're from Iowa and don't have a clue how this new-fangled Internet gadget works, so they just don't know how to explain what happened.
posted by dnash at 9:05 AM on February 9, 2001

I agree wish dnash. It's a thin line for most neophytes between someone writing a .EXE that bamboozles your computer, and a live someone accessing your computer. It's all just symantics and a police department that hasn't gotten the jargon down.
posted by silusGROK at 9:25 AM on February 9, 2001

Speaking of Northwest Internet crime, you gotta check this out. It's got everything: Sex, kidnapping, political asylum, and physical deformity.
posted by aaron at 9:54 AM on February 9, 2001

Yes, it can happen and did happen to a friend of mine's mother. They're just using the word "hacker" because there's no word yet for internet scammers and jackers
posted by cell divide at 10:37 AM on February 9, 2001

Here's the question no one is asking... why are the police in Des Moines surfing the net looking for kiddie porn?? I mean, what if they find some guy in L.A. offering pics in some chat room... do they dispatch one of their crack kiddie porn team to California to make the arrest?? Isn't that a little out of their jurisdiction?
posted by apollo at 10:43 AM on February 9, 2001

This one actually happened to me. Not really sure how, as I wasn't checking out kiddie porn, or any porn for that matter, and never ran any kind of .exe's. The thing is, I'm using a cable modem, yet somehow my phone bill got hit. So while I tend to doubt that i've been hit by a cracker, i don't know what else to think... Any plausible explainations?
posted by shinji_ikari at 10:52 AM on February 9, 2001

<rant>
If you'll allow me to be pedantic for a moment (and I know you will!), I cringe at the word "victimized." It's an obnoxious bit of passivist ambiguity which implies that the actual events are irrelevant and that the mystical transformation into a person who has experienced badness at the hands of another person is what really matters.
</rant>

-Mars
posted by Mars Saxman at 11:18 AM on February 9, 2001

I can corroborate the existence of malicious computer-jacking links, as well. One of my roommates recently clicked some link which attempted to download and run an .EXE -- but since I've got a Macintosh at home, I simply ended up with a random unassociated binary file written to my hard drive. Closer inspection [via a programmer friend who looked at the code] revealed something like what Optamystic talked about: an executable which would rewrite Dial-Up Networking on a Windows machine, resetting it to dial an ISP in area code (809), which is much like (900) numbers except in the Caribbean and therefore ultimately unregulated.

I've also heard of links that actually cause the modem to drop carrier, and dial pay-per-call numbers posing as ISPs directly. Probably not as easy to pull this off without leaving a record of the call, and the chance to make a reimbursement claim against the phone company, IMHO.

Anyway, I agree with everyone else here: either the original author doesn't know the Interent semantics well enough, or (along Mars' path) the police are more responsible for their 'victimhood' than they publicly claim. And my roommates should stop looking at porn on my computer. *grin
posted by legibility at 12:29 PM on February 9, 2001

legibility hits it on the head.

in my work for an adwhore.com company, we investigated and tested porn ads which by user agreement would download an .exe, then drop
your existing connection and dial into a 'sophisticated proprietary network'(sounds like something AOL would try to sell) that would put the user
into the wicked, depraved world of porn they so desired. the dial-up numbers was in Trinidad! and the user had to agree to what would amount to
upwards of $8 a minute or more depending upon the time of day.

the real issue here is that the PD has totally unsophisticated idiots trying(unsuccessfully) to process some rudimentary information and having it
blow up in their face. then they try to deflect the blame upon a mysterious undefined force with generalizations and garbled, inaccurate
technobabble. sounds like the management team here at my office.

the bottom line, if you don't know what you are doing, stick to foot patrol.
posted by donkeysuck at 12:52 PM on February 9, 2001

Why would a cop want to do foot patrol if he could get paid to browse porn all day instead?!?
posted by Neb at 2:00 PM on February 9, 2001

shinji_ikari: i know you use DSL, but do you still have your machine hooked up to the phone line? Did you use a phone modem in the past?

If so, you could still click on an executable and the machine would dial, regardless of how you use the 'net.

If not, there's pretty much no way it happened online. One of your kids called a 900 number.
posted by jpoulos at 2:21 PM on February 9, 2001

Ok, please understand this (and the geekier you are, the more you need to understand it):

General press reporters know NOTHING about computers and how the Internet works.

Nothing at all.

Any details in a general press report concerning computers and networking will match something that might actually happen only by sheer coincidence.

Sometimes this happens because ther person being *interviewed* is clue-free, sometimes it's because the reporter is, and just rarely, it's because an editor ordered a reporter to rewrite something that was correct into something that the paper's readers could actually understand.

But do not try to draw *any* inferences from the wording of a story in the general press. It's a mug's game, at best.
posted by baylink at 2:41 PM on February 9, 2001

What's a "mug's game"?
posted by sudama at 4:44 PM on February 9, 2001

Sucker's game.
posted by dhartung at 11:57 PM on February 9, 2001