BleepingComputer.com: U.S. Justice System Gone Awry In Teacher Porn Case

I try to not use Bleeping Computer as an outlet for my opinions or views, but rather as place to provide objective and unbiased information. In this particular situation, though, I need to let our readers know about something that I, and many others, feel is a great injustice.

A substitute teacher in Norwich Connecticut, named Julie Amero, has been found guilty of four felony counts of injuring or impairing the morals of children. Each of these counts carrying a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. While Julie Amero was substituting for the normal teacher, the spyware infested class computer started displaying popups of a pornographic nature. Students in the classroom unfortunately saw these popups as well. When Julie saw this, she quickly ran to the teacher’s lounge in order to get help with the computer because she could not stop the computer from showing the popups.

As a security professional I am far too familiar with pornographic popups appearing due to an infection. Displaying popups and redirecting browsers to pornographic pages can generate a huge amount of revenue for Spyware companies. With that in mind they do it in such a way that 1) you have no control over them and 2) they display them at a rate that is overwhelming. This is not new and has been going on for many years.

The problem with this case is that Julie is stating that she never accessed these sites, while the prosecution’s forensic team is stating that it is clearly shown Julie had to have purposely clicked on these sites in order to reach them. This is completely untrue. When Spyware redirects your browser to other pages or display popups it does so in a manner that is indistinguishable from a person clicking through links to get to the site. To make matters worse, when a malware displays a popup, the images in these popups are stored on the computer automatically by the browser without any user involvement.

The prosecution kept coming back to that Julie should have just unplugged the computer. Maybe she should have, but the fact is that Julie panicked. Julie was specifically told by the normal teacher for that class not to log off the computer and when she saw the popups, and could not get rid of them, she ran to the teacher’s lounge and asked for assistance. One of the teachers said they would get the principal, who never showed up!

What is even more distressing is that these types of sites should not have been even accessible to the classroom computer. By federal mandate all schools must have active content filtering in place or they could lose funding. The school in question, though, had failed to renew their content filtering subscription and thus many sites were not being blocked as they should. Also why wasn’t the computer kept up to date with proper protection and updates so that the Spyware could not have been installed in the first place?

So who is to blame here? The substitute teacher for failing to unplug the computer and instead going to the teachers lounge for assistance? The school for not keeping their content filtering subscription and computers up to date? I for one do not think it’s Julie’s fault. If you feel the same way as me, please help to spread this story, and keep an innocent person out of jail. For a lot more information on this case please visit the Sunbelt Blog where Alex Eckelberry, the owner of Sunbelt Software,and his team are working hard to keep Julie out of prison and free from blame.