Related link: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/11/technology/11PORN.html

It seems that to anyone familiar with the range of nastiness that a Trojan’s capabilities encompass, depositing some child porn is a not-unexpected problem. Yet Julian Green fought an uphill battle to use this as a defense.

Good forensic analysis should make it both easy to validate this defense for innocents that are accused as well as to invalidate this defense for actual porn-hounds that are claiming it falsely. In fact, the talk I saw at the eGovOS conference last March by a computer forensics investigator from the Air Force specifically addressed the “Trojan horse defense” as a possibility that they entertain.

The worry on the horizon is, I suppose, a Trojan horse that is better at camouflaging itself than the investigator is at finding it. When combined with a targeted attack instead of random infection from a sketchy web site, this would certainly make the accused’s pleas of “I’m innocent!” seem hollow. Child porn is good for discrediting political or business opponents; classified information for framing an government enemy; one criminal could use documents about entering the witness protection program to put false suspicion on another criminal; the list goes on.

What data, Trojan-horsed to whom, do you think would be damaging/amusing/frightening?