RT News Police return hard disk exchanged in discovery from Ark. lawyer with trojans

[gpatt0n]

Published on Apr 23, 2015 The Fort Smith Police Departmentshared a hard drive with a lawyer for whistleblowersin the discovery phase of a court action. Thewhistleblowers had blown the whistle on bad behaviorby the department. When the lawyers got the hard driveback, in addition to files pertinent to the case was aburied folder that contained several known trojans -malware to seriously mess with the lawyer's computer.The Resident discusses. Follow The Resident at http://www.twitter.com/TheResident (Ed note: Having lived in Fort Smith for about adecade in the late 70s, this story is of personalinterest.)

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[TJB]

Isn't that obstruction of justice? They should serve jail time.

[gpatt0n]

The destruction of the emails that were supposed to be part of the discovery could qualify but the placement of trojans on the hard disk would be a direct crime.

 

However, in all fairness, the story fails as a presentation of guilt as it is plausible - or at least arguable - that the infection was not deliberate. I know the attorney claims that it couldn't have found its way there any other way but none of the tech journals I saw the story reported in explained why the act had to be deliberate and provably under the exclusive control of the police. I say this because trojans and the like have quite a reputation of distributing themselves through copying. I.e. if some cop was searching porn and infected the PDs computer - i.e. a security breach??? - couldn't the malware have migrated to the remote hard drive almost automatically.

 

In other words, could the key logger and other malware be under the control of an unknown third party? Wouldn't there have to be a direct connection that incriminates the PD in the proliferation (aka: a backdoor that acknowledges a FSPD associated IP or something?)

 

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