Right now, you could be involved in in
sale and distribution of child pornography and not know it. This is because two things you're familiar with - computer viruses and spam - are being used by criminals to involve you in their illegal activities.It's not surprising to anyone with an e-mail account to learn that spam has reached epidemic proportions. In fact, it's been reported that more spam was intercepted in July, 2003 than in all of 2002 combined, and accounts for 50% of all e-mail received!
The number of virus and virus-like attacks have also increased dramatically. On average, they are present in about one in 166 e-mails. (Source: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-5058168.html)
So, what does this spam epidemic and rise in e-mail delivered viruses have to do with child pornography?
In this scam, Trojan horse attacks are culprits. If you don't know EXACTLY what a Trojan horse, you are extremely vulnerable. Read a simple and concise explanation here: http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/security rojan.html
These Trojan horse programs, delivered and embedded into thousands of home and business computers via spam e-mail, then execute their programs to literally hijack PC's in order to remotely relay ads for pornographic web sites.
Since pornographic images are not actually written to hard drive, owner of PC never even knows what's going on...yet porn ads are being transmitted (spammed) to millions of e-mail addresses from his/her IP address!
Porn is BIG business on Net, raking in billions of dollars annually, and one of most effective way to advertise hundreds of thousands of porn sites is by spamming millions of people every day.
Hijackers use victims' computers to vastly increase scope of their spam campaigns. An additional benefit is that if a victim's ISP terminates their Internet account because of spam complaints, hijackers are unfazed because they have hundreds or thousands of additional computers doing their dirty work for them.
And when hijackers turn into cyber-criminals and begin using same methods to engage in child pornography and exploitation, you could get caught up in a very serious situation.
In one recent case "a man accused of storing CHILD pornography on his computer was cleared after it emerged that his computer had been infected by a Trojan horse, which was responsible for transferring images onto his PC."
