Naval War College Official Placed on Leave Over Pornographic Link in Email
“The matter is currently under investigation”
Oops. He is blaming this on a hack of his home computer.
The Navy Times reports:
Naval War College official on leave over pornographic link in email
A top official at the Naval War College in Rhode Island has been put on leave after an email sent on his behalf to all faculty contained a link to a pornographic image.
Provost Lewis Duncan blamed the link, which was supposed to be a link to a faculty survey, on a hack of his home computer.
“The matter is currently under investigation,” Cmdr. Gary Ross, a spokesman for the Newport school, told The Providence Journal on Friday. “It would be inappropriate for me to discuss the matter at this time.”
The message from Duncan went out via the deputy provost’s email account on July 21, the newspaper reported.
After a professor pointed out the errant link, Duncan said in a followup message that his home computer had been compromised by “severe risk” malware.
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Comments
That’s completely plausible. But more likely it didn’t come from his computer at all, and his From address was spoofed.
In any event suspending him for such a thing shows whoever made that decision to be clueless
Also entirely plausible is that he pasted the clipboard into his email and forgot he’d been surfing porn while composing work email.
As a former IT Director, I assure you this scenario is much, much more likely than “my computer was hacked”.
E-mail can be hacked without having to hack the computer which didn’t actually send it. If he has malware on his computer it’s not likely to announce its presence with silly antics like e-mailing pics. It should be keeping a low profile as it logs passwords or inserts ad links into his browsers; useful things like that.
Could also have been altered by hacking/malware at his ISP or other common link, before branching off to the various recipients.
I randomly send and receive phantom mail from/to PCs of my colleagues at work. The assistance folks could not find the virus so far. These mails contain a .doc or .pdf file that wont’open, but probably replicates the virus.