I am a little late catching up on this, but felt it worthwhile to voice my comment. Similar to most of this feedback, I would hope that the true perpetrators of this "crime" be brought to justice. Therein lies the dilemma of assigning accountability for these types of occurrences.

If the machine was indeed hijacked, then the substitute teacher's innocence seems well beyond reasonable to me.

So, next we point to the school/state for accountability (blame). Who is to say that their security software and filtering system are 100% effective? I don't mean to get too far off the path of reality, but let's theorize for just a moment. Pretend that the machine in question had actually been running a fully patched version of Vista (we're just theorizing), with the latest anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-phising, privacy protection, all patched, all signatures updated. Now, what if it still got hijacked and the porn pop ups came up during the class? Entirely possible, given the rise in 0-day exploits.

We then may find ourselves looking elsewhere for accountability. The teacher didn't do anything malicious. The school exercised due diligence in protecting the computer. Now where do you point your finger? Microsoft? The security software vendor?

Obviously I don't have an answer to that question, and judging by the buzz around these events in the news, it's not clear. But, as one reader pointed out, there most certainly is a level of corruption in "the system" of today and truth seems to prevail with less frequency. That alone saddens me, but it makes it even worse to see technology caught up in the middle.

[ reply ]

Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/articles/11440/34324#34324