beforeyoukillyourcomputer.com Saving computers one at a time from their owners

Consumerist launched a three month investigation into Geek Squad on claims the technicians would browse computers for sensitive files and then copy them over to their personal drives. They loaded up a computer with porn, rigged the computer to capture video of itself, and then caught a Geek Squad technician stealing the porn off the hard drive. Geek Squad responded that it was an isolated incident, although insiders say the practice is extremely common. So let this be a warning to everyone: keep all your sensitive files on an external hard drive unless you want to share them with Geek Squad employees. Or better yet, just email them all to me and I’ll watch over them for you. See this tie I’m wearing? That’s how you call tell I’m a professional.

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Ignorance of the law is no excuse but here is a different spin on that commonly used phrase:

In January, a jury found Amero guilty of four felony charges of risking injury to a minor or impairing the morals of a child, following a 2004 incident where her classroom PC became infected with pop-up ads that displayed thumbnails of pornographic imagery. The prosecution maintained that the pop-up ads were caused by Amero’s activity on the PC and the testimony of a forensic expert that would have refuted the charges was curtailed by courtroom rules…

“The primary reason that I got involved was to get Julie out of this train wreck, but it was also to bring awareness to the problem of malware and forensic analysis — it is a big problem,” he said.

In the latest case, one of the school’s teacher logged into the classroom computer, because Amero did not have credentials. The substitute teacher was told not to log out or turn off the computer. What happened after that has become the main point of contention.

A detective on the case using off-the-shelf recovery software argued that Amero clicked on pornographic Web links and caused the computer to display pornographic pop-up advertisements. However, the defense’s forensic expert, Herbert Horner, stated that a more complete analysis showed that a harmless hairstyling Web site had actually redirected the PC’s browser to pornographic sites, setting off the deluge of offensive ads.

The forensic analysis produced by Eckelberry and other independent security researchers found a large number of inconsistencies between what was said during Amero’s trial and what really happened, according to the analysis of the computer’s hard drive.