Hijacked by Porn

It was like stumbling into electronic quicksand: every attempt to escape only drew unsuspecting Net surfers, including children, more deeply into Web pages full of explicit sex. That lurid webscam, allegedly cooked up by a Portuguese hacker and an Australian company, was halted last week by a federal court after the Federal Trade Commission uncovered the brazen scheme. It worked like this: first, according to the FTC, the perpetrators replicated hundreds of legitimate websites, ranging from the Japanese Friendship Garden to the Harvard Law Review. By changing a single line of hidden software code, the culprits then ensured that any visitor...