14 DAY TRIAL // Julie Amero, the teacher who was convicted in January 2007 for showing pornographic pictures to her students, received a new trial today. The case was at least interesting: her PC was left unattended and opened pornographic images that were then viewed by the students. Although it wasn't a clear sign of ignorance, the teacher sustained that some malicious files infected the computer and opened the adult material without any request to the user. The 40-year-old teacher faced a 40 year in prison sentence but she received today a new trial.
"We see lots of malware that is designed to drive traffic to adult websites without the user granting permission. Additionally, hackers break into badly defended PCs and plant unsavoury pop-up adverts onto innocent users' systems in order to generate revenue," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "Granting Julie Amero's defense team a new trial is a victory for common sense, as there are clearly elements of this case that raise serious doubts about whether the court was properly informed of the facts at the original hearing."
It's quite obvious that the malicious files can be more dangerous than we expect as the teacher might face 40 years in prison for a simple infection with spyware. Although there is a considerable number of anti-spyware solutions available on the software market, most of them proved us that they're vulnerable to attacks and may harm our computers with a simple successful exploitation.
In the past, the Internet threats caused even more problems to the users because they brought even more than prison. Take for example the spam messages that caused a woman's death after she bought pills from them. Because the medicines contained prohibited elements, they caused the woman's dead. So, until we are able to install a 100 percent efficient solution, be careful with your computer activities...