Your home; it's where you and your family live. Chances are you keep the doors locked. You leave the lights on. And you may even have a security system.
These are the lengths you go to to keep your family safe and to keep thieves away.
So why wouldn't you do the same for your computer?
"If there are ten possible computers they can use, they're gonna pick up the one with the weakest security," said Steven Birmingham about computer hackers and people who attempt to infect computers with viruses.
Birmingham is the Director of Information Technology for Central Pennsylvania College. He told CBS 21 News that internet security is something people need to take seriously, especially if they are prone to surfing the web and downloading programs and attachments.
"If something seems amiss, pay attention to that," Birmingham said. "Make sure you're not venturing into an area that you don't want to go into."
On Sunday, the
Associated Press reported about its investigation into a computer virus that downloads child pornography to a person's private computer without their knowledge The AP reported that there have been many occasions when a person has been accused of accessing child pornography, only to have police later learn that a virus was to blame.
"It's definitely getting more wild at this point in time," said Josh Nelson, who runs
My Computer Doctor of Central PA. Nelson said that his business has been kept very busy in recent weeks trying to remove viruses and spyware from clients' computers.
Nelson has never worked on a computer where he has found child pornography, but he has seen many computers with pornographic images saved to them that the owner never knew were there.
"It's the trickle down effect at that point," Nelson said. "The deeper into that sexually explicit internet browsing that you get into, that's when you could run into the child pornography."
Nelson said if he were to discover child pornography on a client's computer he would be required to contact the police, but he said a deeper investigation would be able to reveal whether or not the client purposefully downloaded the material.
It is a difficult process to remove these viruses once they have infected your computer, Nelson said. Doing so would likely involve a multi-faceted approach, Nelson said, because the viruses are updated so constantly. And the "solutions" are sometimes the opposite.
"The problem is there's so many of these applications out there that claim to provide support for those... and the truth is they're viruses themselves."
