Spyware mum foils pervert
Key logging app exposes child abuse offender
Posted in Security, 1st June 2007 11:38 GMT
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Keylogging software helped a UK mum warn police about a US-based predator who was grooming her 15-year-old son for child abuse.
Jason Bower, 26, of Hudson Falls, New York, was arrested as he boarded a plane en route to meet the teenager in England last November. In court on Wednesday, Bower pleaded guilty to "engaging in sexual acts on a webcam with the British boy", and exchanging explicit images, AP reports. Bower faces a likely minimum of five years' imprisonment at a sentence hearing scheduled for November.
US Attorney Tom Spina said Bower's offences came to light after the victim's mum, concerned about what he was doing online, planted keylogging software on her son's PC. She reported what she found, which realised her worst fears, to local police who alerted US Immigration and Customs investigators.
Keylogging software and other forms of spyware applications are normally used by financially-motivated crooks. The type of keylogging software used by the UK mum in this case, or how she got a hold of it, remains unclear. ®
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