Comments on: well, they certainly weren’t regulating: the SEC porn scandal

By: L.

L. — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 15:37:16 +0000

… and, Violet, thanks for the warning – otherwise I mightn’t have noticed your link to one of my most faves – and again been reminded that I’m not so alone – as a woman who likes it too – so again, thank you … _^^_

By: Dez

Dez — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 23:40:28 +0000

Hang on a sec, let’s do a little reality check here. You say you get somewhere around 1 HTTP request (or “click”) to a porn site every 1-3 minutes or so for those two cases, the 16,000 in a month one and 1,800 in two weeks. This is purely on average.

Consider that a web surfer might click something several times in 1-3 minutes (could be around 20-100 requests, especially if the page isn’t loading fast or at all, and they keep clicking stuff, all of these get logged too) then they stop being naughty for an hour or two when their boss or co-worker is around, then they’ll porn surf later and repeat the process. Also consider the fact that a visited page (especially an unfiltered one) might have scripts, frames, or objects (such as a Flash video) that will access other hosts, which could each also count as an additional “request” to a porn site within the same page.

And if it is indeed a malware program that’s doing something like this, why are there 600+ pornographic images on the hard drive? If a malware program downloaded all those, where can I get one of those installed on my computer? And I think it’s obvious if someone has a hard drive filled with porn, as well as porn burned on CDs and DVDs all over the office that someone was caught red-handed!

By: Gendun

Gendun — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:05:47 +0000

“1600 times a month, for one person, is 800 times in one workday.”

Assuming 20 work days a month, that’s 80 times in one workday, not 800.

I wonder if they’re logging auto-refreshes as “requests”.

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:53:52 +0000

Are you seriously relying on numbers reported by the SEC? umm… ;)

By: Stranger527

Stranger527 — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:16:29 +0000

Show us the router and server logs! How many of the requests were to the same IP addresses? Where was IT? A decent proxy server or domain filter should have caught the requests. Hell, NetNanny would have done a better job.

With the math that you presented, you would think no work was getting done at the SEC and someone would notice all of the clicking and fapping.

I’m with you… With the porn allegation running across the office like that, it would seem some type of malware was released behind the SEC’s safeguards. (geez, I hope that they have decent Safeguards.)

By: gWebber

gWebber — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 09:24:50 +0000

“Another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month.”

Sixteen THOUSAND works out to once every 1.25 minutes give or take.
That’s assuming a 8 hour day, 40 hour week and 22 working days in a month.
That’s no human doing it. What the heck is their IT department doing? Where my wife works they block so much stuff she can hardly check Yahoo Mail.

By: moneda

moneda — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 09:16:18 +0000

“An SEC accountant attempted to access porn websites…”

This strikes me every time I read about this. When I attempt to visit a site at work and the screen tells me it’s blocked, that’s the last time I attempt to visit that site. Malware doesn’t reason that way, though, because malware cannot reason. This may turn out to be much ado about nothing.