Recover Lost Documents

Authorities say that a former contractor who worked at an U.S. military base in Iraq is accused of hacking into the computers of teenage girls in the U.S., and coercing many of them into providing him inappropriate pictures of themselves.

Mike Schneider stated in his article for the Associated Press (on Yahoo! News) that Patrick Connolly was charged with a single count of computer hacking following his arrest in Atlanta, say authorities.

Six of the seven teenage girls named as victims in the criminal complaint lived in Florida, but authorities said that he contacted teenage girls from various parts of the world beginning in 2005.

The criminal complaint states that Connolly worked in Baghdad for EOD Technology Inc., a U.S. Department of Defense contractor based in Tennessee. A spokesman, however, stated that he is no longer a contract employee with the company. William Pearse, a company vice president, stated that EOD Technology officials cooperated with authorities.

Authorities said that the teenage girls first would get repeated instant messages from an unfamiliar address. When the girls asked who the sender was, they would get the response, “I’m a computer hacker.” A request from the hacker for revealing photos would soon follow. If the girls refused to do so, the hacker would threaten to post personal information on the Web about the teenagers gathered from hacking into their computers.

According the criminal complaint, Connolly threatened to harm a teenage girl’s sister, deleted permanent files on a second teenage girl’s computer for refusing to send suggestive images and warned he would send explicit webcam images made by a third teenage girl to her grandmother if she didn’t take more pictures of herself.

The criminal complaint also stated that he showed up at the Orlando workplace of the third teenage girl, who was 16 at the time, and wanted to go with her to a popular theme park, but she refused.

The complaint goes on to state that Connolly embedded programs into the computers which gave him remote control of the computers and allowed him access to photos and files belonging to the teenage girls.

A former alleged accomplice, Ivory Dickerson, aided FBI agents in their investigation after telling them that he “shared victims” with Connolly.

FBI agents increased their investigation of Connolly this past January after he allegedly contacted via Facebook one of the teenage girls he had allegedly harassed years earlier.

After a mishap in which 0.05 percent of documents stored on the Google Docs site were inadvertently shared, privacy advocates have begun turning to the Federal Trade Commission to shut down all of Google’s online services until government-approved safeguards have been firmly laid out.

Paul Lilly stated in his article for Maximum PC that Marc Rotenberg, a lawyer and adjunct law professor, compared the situation to an unsafe child safety seat. Rotenberg summarized in a telephone interview to CNET that if a child seat could not be securely attached to a car passenger seat, then the FTC would vehemently tell the company who manufactured it to fix the problem. Rotenberg stated that consumers are at risk when a product or service is released for users to utilize and yet it is far from secure.

The Google Docs incident in question occurred in early March of this year, in which Google claimed that a bug caused an isolated incident in which a minute fraction of users of its Google Docs service had their word-processing and presentation documents shared.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center submitted a letter to the FTC asking that all of Google’s cloud-computing services be halted, including their e-mail service, Gmail. In addition to shutting everything down, EPIC also wants Google to pay a “public fund” to benefit advocacy groups of $5 million.

Dominating retailer Wal-Mart is looking to follow in the footsteps of Google, Microsoft and other companies who are looking to get into the digital health records market.

Sindya Bhanoo reported in The Industry Standard that Wal-Mart is planning to bring its low-cost, high-volume methods to the healthcare industry by offering a deal that consists of hardware, software, installation, maintenance and training to modify a doctor’s office from using paper to digital medical records.

Wal-Mart already operates a prescription program and an online pharmacy, and the company recently launched an internal e-health initiative. The program allows more than 1.4 million Wal-Mart employees to access their personal health records on the Web.

Wal-Mart could be competing with the likes of Google, GE and Microsoft, all of whom have announced products and services relating to digital health records space.

President Barack Obama’s recent $19 billion-dollar allocation in the stimulus package to digitize electronic medical records has many companies looking to compete. The New York Times reports that there may also be incentives of $40,000 per physician to install and utilize digital health records.

During his presidential campaign, Obama promised to digitize every health record in the country by 2012.

Independent studies from Harvard, RAND and the Commonwealth Fund found that a national health records system will cost from $75 billion to $100 billion over the next 10 years, reported CNN.com.

Security professionals are warning that some new “scareware” programs, that attempt to frighten users into buying bogus security products, also encrypt the user’s digital documents until he or she agrees to pay a $50 ransom demand.

Brian Krebs stated in his blog on computer security for The Washington Post that newer versions of the scareware Antivirus2009 warn users in a fraudulent Windows alert that files in their “My Documents” folder are corrupt. The program then directs the user to a download of a program called “FileFixerPro” to supposedly fix the corrupted files.

In reality, this version of Antivirus2009 encrypts or scrambles the contents in My Documents so that only users who pay $50 for a FileFixerPro license are able to get the decryption key needed to regain full access to their My Documents folder.

Several security forums, stated Krebs, consist of many users who are seeking help because they have apparently have fallen victim to this threat and have had their documents scrambled.

Krebs reported that BleepingComputer.com, a computer-help forum, has posted instructions on how to remove FileFixerPro. But, unfortunately, a victim’s documents will be unable to be retrieved.

FireEye, however, has figured out how to decrypt documents scrambled by this threat and is offering a free Web-based service where users can upload documents to have them de-scrambled. Senior security researcher Alex Lanstein stated that he hopes the company will soon be able to release a tool that users can download to help decrypt their entire My Documents folder.

Krebs reported that according to a report by the Anti-Phishing Working Group, the number of new rogue security programs has increased by 225 percent from 2,850 in July to 9.287 in December.