The Big City

I was searching around on the peer-to-peer networks yesterday, looking for a new copy of Microsoft Office to download. What I found instead was a whole load of letters and documents on someone’s hard drive. He had obviously set up his client wrong and was accidentally sharing everything on his computer. I had to get off to work so I downloaded a couple of interesting looking things to read later. When I did read them I was amazed, I won’t go into the details because I think it might turn out to be a rather interesting story but I was very keen to see what other stuff I could find on his computer today.

So I was doing a very specific search today for the name of one of the documents I found yesterday. I knew that nobody would have a document with the exact same name apart from that one computer. Once I’d found the computer I could then try and browse around for more interesting stuff. So I was very surprised when the program found more than a hundred matches. I was after something called “442 Kharzid SENT”. The matches were called things like “442 Kharzid sent.zip”, “442 Kharzid sent DEMO.zip”, even “442 Kharzid sent_Teen_Porn.jpg”, and they were all the same size and all available on the same computer. I suspect that these files must all be viruses, maybe designed to allow spammers to use other people’s machines to send their spam. I downloaded one (most viruses don’t affect Macintosh computers) but Norton Anti-virus didn’t recognise anything wrong. Maybe this virus is too new for them to be aware of it.

This is a very scary idea for file sharers. If you were searching for the normal kinds of things that people look for, something that would return loads of results, you’d have no way of knowing if some of those results were actually being created on purpose in order to get you to download a virus. I have a feeling this story may be appearing in the mainstream media in a few month’s time.