Sober Worm Prompts Net Perv Confession
“A child porn suspect turned himself in to the police after mistaking an email generated by a prolific internet worm for an official notice he was under investigation. The unnamed 20-year-old German man mistook a message produced by the Sober-Z worm for an email from Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Crime Office) supposedly telling him his visits to illegal websites had been logged. He went to police in the city of Paderborn who charged the man after reportedly recovering images of child abuse from his computer. ‘It just goes to show that computer worms aren’t always destructive,’ a police spokesman told Reuters. ‘Here it helped us to uncover a crime which would otherwise probably have gone undetected.’ ‘We’re used to explaining to people that there’s no such thing as a good virus, but in this case it appears that the Sober-Z worm has accidentally scared an internet paedophile into contacting the police,’ said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at anti-virus firm Sophos.” — Channel Register (UK)
The Sober worm — in its various mutating forms — has been called one of the most malicious code outbreaks ever. It generates a lot of junk email with various sorts of bogus messages, including one that tries to scare you into thinking that you’re being watched online — which you are, in various ways, though probably not to such a degree as the young man in this story thought. According to one source, this is the message (translated by Google) that he received:
Downloading of films, software and MP3s is illegal and thus punishable. We would like to communicate to you hereby first that your computer under the IP was seized. Contents their computers were guaranteed as evidence and it a preliminary investigation against you in-slide. The charge and the possibility for the statement are set for you in writing in the next days. — Federal Criminal Investigation Office Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigations
The incredible thing is that this message makes no mention whatsoever of child pornography and seems geared toward file-sharing instead. This makes you wonder if the perp in question actually received a message more strongly worded than this one, since it’s hard to believe that anyone would confess to pedophilia when threatened with downloading MP3s. That’s like confessing to murder when a cop just wants to give you a parking ticket.
On the other hand, the novels of Dostoievski taught that one of the most difficult things about committing a crime is simply keeping quiet about it. Lots of criminals confess — sometimes out of shame, sometimes out of pride. Perhaps it wasn’t really the virus that encouraged the young man in this story to incriminate himself but some more basic human emotion — like guilt or grandeur. That would make more sense, odd as it may sound to say that any spam could ever touch on fundamental human feelings.
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