I haven’t cleaned out a virus/spambot infected PC in over 2-3 years now, but when I was doing that for my kids, and of some my friends (after their kids downloaded file-sharing borne viral crap etc) I never ever saw any kiddie porn. All of the forced SPAM that was adult related (about 10%-20% of total) was ads for the typical suspects of porn sites, dating sites, love techniques, herbal Spanish fly type products etc. Virtually all the porn sites were front end style portal ads not discrete pics, and even if bestiality was mentioned on some of the more “XXXTREME” sites I never saw a whisper of kiddie porn. I always had the notion that kiddie porn was so radioactive that it was something you had to go looking for.
Is the “spam-bot did it” really a viable scenario for kiddie porn being on a PC?
Porn spammers want you to visit their (non-kiddie) porn sites and don’t send kiddie stuff, as you said. However, malicious virus-spreaders MIGHT do it, just for the “fuck with people” value of it. Two different entities, two different motivations. So, I would think that in the case of the former, likely not; the latter, possibly.
Any computer that has been compromised may end up being used to store all sorts of contraband, including warez and porn. I saw this happen to a computer at work. Someone hacked into the computer and immediately filled the disk with porn videos that were then downloaded by people all over the world. Why store it on your computer when you can use someone else’s disk space and network bandwidth?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real, non-commercial “fuck with people” net spamming virus. and I’ve been playing with PCs for some time. I’ve seen plenty of "“fuck with people” destructive viruses that delete or mangle files or display “gotcha” messages, but anything that uploads (that I’ve ever seen) is always commercially oriented.
Technically it’s very possible. Practically, I think it would be hard to prove one way or another, unless the defendant can isolate the particular malware that did the downloading and demonstrate it working or disassemble it to show the instructions. Of course in the meantime the site it was downloading from may have removed it’s content, so then you’d have to prove what was on the site at the time. Everything is so temporary on computers, things can be added or deleted at a whim, with basically no trace left.
Yes - as I understand it, some of the trojans out there hijack the computer in order to make it a repository (or node, or whatever is the appropriate term) for filesharing networks or similar - so it doesn’t seem entirely implausible that some of the incoming content could be kiddie porn.
I have also seen claims (mostly from people with varying amounts of tinfoil in their hats) that certain organizations or agencies have developed malware to deliberately place child porn on someone’s computer. The theory is that if they have someone they need to discredit or get rid of then they run their malware and allow the porn to be “discovered” on the victims computer. The victim is immediately fired/discredited/thrown in jail and no one listens to their defense because, hey, who wants to defend a child molester?
So the idea that a virus of some kind could do something like that has been floating around for a while.
It is also possible that he was deliberately targeted. Either as an individual, or more likely, someone discovering they had access to a government issue laptop and dumped the pics on it to cause just this sort of trouble because, hey, stick it to the man!
But why would commercial porn sites always have to be adult-oriented. Kiddie porn makers have an economic incentive, too, otherwise they wouldn’t make it.
I mean, the shills wouldn’t be as obvious as the shills for legal porn, but then again, in countries where child porn is made and distributed pretty much unchecked (say, Cambodia), there’s no reason for a CP distributor NOT to send samples of his wares and solicit credit-card numbers, via spam or malware if necessary.